Oman Air Route Network, December 2015: The Eastward Routes

Continuing from the previous post, Oman Air has followed the general strategy of all other Gulf carriers, by provided an extensive medium and long-haul network across South and Southeast Asia, best understood as serving the constant flow of labor migrants from the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan into its home market and across the Gulf region.

Oman Air has yet to take on the business hubs of East Asia, although since this map was published in December 2015, the carrier has launched flights to Guangzhou, just last month.

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: South Asia

Like its Gulf rivals, Qatar Airways has blanketed South Asia with direct service to more than two-dozen cities: seven in Pakistan and thirteen in India. Too many to label here, but like Emirates and Etihad, Qatar acts as a de-facto state carrier not for the Gulf region but for the Indian subcontinent. 

Gulf Air Network, October 2016: The Eastward Routes

Our final post on Gulf Air looks at its flights to South Asia and its few remaining long-haul services to the Pacific Rim, which today consist only of Bangkok and Manila. India and Pakistan are still thoroughly covered. 

Etihad Route Map, September 2016: South Asia

Like its Gulf siblings, Etihad and the UAE rely on commercial, trade, and labor links with South Asia for primary sustenance. Abu Dhabi's state carrier therefore serves the region respectably, from Karachi to Kozhikode to Kolkata to Kathmandu, if, again, not quite as exhaustively as its rival Emirates, it has recently upgraded its flights to Mumbai to its double-deck A380, one of only five cities in the network that see such girth. The next post will look further east to its Australiasian services. 

Emirates Route Map, August 2016: South Asia

While the Indian subcontinent was not detailed on the worldwide map of Emirates Airline's routes, the region is vital to the megacarrier's strategy and success. The perennial observation of Emirates growth and network, both regionally and globally, is that the airline is not so much a flag-carrier for the UAE or the Gulf region, but for the huge populations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Dubai itself acts as a major business capital for these economies and a convenient offshore banking, trade and leisure destination for the region's elite. With megacities such as Mumbai, Karachi and Delhi just a few hours away, hardly enough time to serve dinner on the business class deck of an A380, strategy for Emirates, and for Dubai, has paid off, as evidenced by the dearth of non-stop flights between India and North America. 

Thai Airways Route Table, A-G, November 2016

Echoing a post from earlier this week, Thai Airways has kept up its tradition of matrixing its entire route network in the back pages of its in-flight magazine. Details include the mileage, flight time, time zone, and even the local contact number. Comparing to the 2013 version, the increased number of Chinese cities, such as Changsha and Chongqing, is most obvious. 

The entire table will be covered in the following series of posts. 

Muscat Airport: Arrivals on 12 December, 2015

An unfortunately blurry image of the mid-day arrivals screens for Muscat International Airport on 12 December 2015. Dominated, naturally, by Oman Air, with multiple incoming flights from nearby Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait, and Makkah, and a spread of subcontinental landings from Delhi, Chennai, Karachi, Colombo, Bangalore, Jaipur, Lahore, Calicut and Male. Longer range operations such as Bangkok and the Singapore-Kuala Lumpur operation arrive at about 1PM, with one of the few domestic flights, from Salalah, come in twice that afternoon. Air Arabia to Sharjah and flydubai put low-cost, short-haul operations on the board. 

Delta Air Lines: Dubai to Atlanta, January 2016

A poster-stand placed outside an upscale travel agency in Dubai, advertising Delta's non-stop service to Atlanta, promising connections across the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and beyond. At the time of the photo had barely a month to go. The flight was scrapped in a high-profile complaint by Delta that Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways have unfair advantage in the market. Although hardly the only market that Delta has retreated from (see Abuja, Monrovia, Cairo, Kiev, Amman, Bucharest, Budapest, Helsinki, Warsaw, Vienna, Cape Town, Delhi, Chennai, Istanbul, among others), Delta also stated in its press release announcing its withdrawal from Mumbai that the failure of the route was also due to the massive capacity that the Gulf 3 have added. It surely stung that Qatar launched a new service from Doha to Atlanta just months later—starting the service with an A380.

United Air Lines also pulled out of Dubai in January, and has also withdrawn the remainder of its Gulf operations, citing the same uncompetitive conditions, although here is an interesting blogpost regarding United's withdrawal from Kuwait, suggesting a different sort of government involvement.

Singapore Airlines: The Asian connections, 2013

From a global business traveler magazine back cover, Singapore Airlines, Silk Air and Changi Airport partner to boast of the easy connections from Manila to Male, Denspasar to Delhi. While the routes fan upwards toward mainland and offshore China, they do not attempt to show Korea or Japan, but instead link a dozen cities each in India, Indonesia and Southeast Asia, many of which are in fact served by the little sister carrier, SilkAir.

Most notably dating the advert is the list of long-haul routes: San Francisco, Houston, Los Angeles and New York. While all four cities are served from Singapore, none are nonstop nowadays, as the ultra-long haul A340 flights were discontinued at the end of 2013. Today they are paired Houston-Moscow, Los Angeles-Tokyo, New York-Frankfurt, and San Francisco with both Seoul and Hong Kong.

Thai Airways: International Routes table, 2013

Similar to the table provided in South African Airways' inflight magazine, Thai Airways provides a listing of its international destinations from Bangkok, with distances, flight duration, local time at a local reservations phone number.

Air Mauritius Network, c.2011

Air Mauritius, Africa's fourth-largest airline, has an admirable reach across four continents. Especially impressive are the links with three Australian and three South African cities, the four largest hubs of India (bridging the sizable South Asian diaspora on the island state) and the cluster of long routes to Europe: six major gateways in five countries, plying the high-end tourist trade. Shanghai had just been added at the time of this map's publication, and two grey circles detail code-share set-ups which reach deep into westernmost Europe and southeast Asia. Unfortunately, since this graphic was drawn, some of this spread has retreated: Kuala Lumpur, Milan, Sydney and Melbourne are all sadly departed.

Air India: the Gulf Routes, c.2012

Air India has more routes to the Gulf than what remains of its European, North American, or nonexistent African network but still the coverage is spare. Cairo is not served, Kuwait is farmed out, and there is no direct service from such megacities as Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad or Amritsar (that latter three not even shown here) but only from the Keralan coastal centers of Kozhikode, Kochi, and Thiruvananthapuram.

Major Gulf hubs such as Doha and Bahrain are also absent. The label for Abu Dhabi is far removed from its dot, also. Everything about the contemporary Air India, a sad shadow of its former self, indicates an airline out of focus.

Jet Airways: 3 Direct Daily Flights from Brussels to India, January 2012

Jet Airways, India's premier international carrier, operates a so-called "scissors hub" out of Brussels National Airport, connecting its North American destinations (New York-JFK, Newark, and Toronto) and its subcontinental bases (Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi), so that eat many times there may be multiple Jet Airways wide bodies parked at the terminals at Zavantem. The above advertisement is from a backlit billboard above the departures hall at BRU.

Oman Air: Worldwide Network, 2011: Detail #2: The Subcontinent

Oman Air is in all ways a smaller iteration of the Gulf's burgeoning supercarriers. This similarity includes an expansive array of destinations in its South Asian backyard. With far fewer seat-miles to the Subcontinent than its rivals, Oman Air nonetheless offers more than 15 destinations out of Muscat, catering especially to foreign contract workers and shopping trippers.

Please see the two previous posts for more about Oman Air's current network, worldwide and in the Middle East.

Air Seychelles Network, January 2011

A recent route map of Air Seychelles shows an airline much diminished from previous times, although still serving three continents with Boeing 767 jets.

Like its Indian Ocean counterparts, especially Air Mauritius and Air Madagascar, the national carrier of the Seychelles mostly concentrates on leisure services to Europe, which in this case included services to both London Heathrow and Gatwick, in addition to Paris, Rome, and Milan. Previous services to Frankfurt, Munich, Geneva, Zürich, Amsterdam, Madrid, Moscow and Paris-Orly have not lasted. The Gatwick service only lasted from 2010 and was recently terminated February 2011.

Aside from these services, Air Seychelles runs a single route to Chennai and on to Singapore. Previous routes to Dubai, Bangkok, and Mumbai were not successful, despite the cultural and business connections to India and southeast Asia. Likewise, its services to the African continent are spare: only Johannesburg. Not even its previous Nairobi route lasted. The airline seems to be having little success in becoming a hub carrier for traffic across the Indian Ocean, connecting Asia and Africa.

Air Mauritius: Worldwide Network, 2010

Air Mauritius has a thorough network to four continents. Given its remote location in the Indian Ocean, much of its operations are long-haul flights. Most of its fleet consists of A340/A330 widebodies, with three destinations in Australia, three in South Africa, three to India and three in East Asia-- as multi-continental as the island country's rich culture.

The next post details Air Mauritius's high-yield long-haul routes to Europe.