Wow Air Network, 2015

 Continuing the wake for PLAY, here we see the fullest extent of its predecessor, the Barney-purple world of WOW Air. Thinner than either its successor or its flag-carrier rival, Icelandair, with only 2 routes across the Atlantic, to Boston and Washington-Dulles. Like the other two, familiar outstations include Tenerife, Salzburg, and Warsaw, while WOW's unique reach included Lyon and Vilnius. 

Farewell to Icelandic PLAY Airlines, 2025

 

A billboard at Keflavík Airport, advertising the route system of ultra-low-cost airline PLAY as it appeared in September 2024. Heavy on continental Europe, with significant overlap of its flag-carrier rival Icelandair to Span and Scandinavia, but with a handful of unique outstations including Athens, Bologna, Lisbon, Liverpool, Porto, and Venice. 

The service to "New York" was actually to Stewart International Airport in Newburgh some 60 miles north of what most people consider the destination "New York" to be; likewise the flight to "Toronto" was actually to John C. Monro Airport in Hamilton, Ontario—not the better known hubs served by Icelandair (both of these smaller airports making their Timetablist debut with this post). The Canadian operation ended in the Spring of 2025 as PLAY liquidated its transatlantic operations. 

Whatever the commercial attempts undertaken to differentiate itself, PLAY went the way of purple predecessor WOW Air and is no longer with us. 

Air Malta Network, Summer 2011

 

Malta has long acted as a crossroads of the Mediterranean: stage of empires, prophets, and crusades. Today it is a densely-populated, package-tour destination, home to a sizable contingent of Ryanair retirees, and more recently has earned a (dis)reputation as a corrupt tax haven. 

All these priorities are reflected in the reach of its long-operating flag carrier, Air Malta. There are numerous links in the eastern Mediterranean: Athens, Istanbul, and Larnaca, and eight airports in Italy, including several that don't see many foreign carriers, like Verona, or the cities on the nearby boot and isle of Sicily: Catania and Reggio Calabria—here making its Timetablist debut.

Likewise, there is an abundance of service to the UK and Germany, true to the island's nature as a holiday-break hub. Secondary cities such as Aberdeen, Leeds, and East Midlands in Britain and Bremen, Dresden, Hamburg, Hanover and Stuttgart in Germany. 

Curiously, the map also has small insets at left, with the central portion of the United States East Coast above, and the Gulf below. The former is marked with two destination dots: "Newark" and "Manhattan" while Abu Dhabi is denoted on the latter. However, Air Malta has never had either wide-body, long-haul aircraft nor has it ever served any long-haul destinations, not to the Middle East and certainly not transatlantically. These are surely some sort of code-share designation, but that is not explained; furthermore, unless Air Malta has a partnership with a Helicopter service, in no way does it actually serve Manhattan any more than any other airline, codeshare or not. 

Discover Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen Airport, 2019

While the last few posts have discussed Istanbul's old Atatürk Airport, which closed last year to passenger flights, which shifted to the gigantic new airport, the Asian side of the city also has a large international airport: Sabiha Gökçen, which is advertised here by Turkish Airlines, At this particular moment in time, TK was expanding its presence at the secondary base, and at the bottom of this print advert is a list of almost twenty destinations in Europe and the Near East, from Kuwait to London (although it doesn't say which airport). The mention of "Northern Cyprus" likewise does not get specific, but presumably this refers to Ercan International Airport. 

After the opening of the new airport, Turkish re-centralized its mainline operations, and transferred almost all its international flights from SAW to its wholly-owned subsidiary, AnadoluJet. By the end fo the first quarter of 2020, Turkish only served a few domestic routes from SAW, which is dominated by rival low-cost Turkish carrier Pegasus Airlines, which links Istanbul's Asian districts as far as Manchester and Karachi. 

Tunisair Network, Early 2017

Tiny Tunisair is growing. Now extending to four continents, with extensive connections to metropolitan France (Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Toulouse) as part of more than two-dozen European destinations, including third-level cities like Belgrade and Düsseldorf. 

The Western Africa network is not as extensive as other carriers, but Tunis is now connected to seven francophone sub-Saharan capitals, from Nouakchott to Niamey. Three routes to the Middle East are sustained: Beirut, Jeddah and Medina, which is misplaced on this otherwise straightforward graphic representation. Not every venture has met with success, as the airline's flights to Dubai were scrapped, as has been previously reported here. 

Pride of the carrier is the airline's most distant service: the year-old long-haul link to Montreal, Tunisair's first wide-body, trans-Atlantic operation. 

Etihad Route Map, September 2016: Europe

Continuing to perhaps unfairly compare Etihad to its larger rival Emirates, the twenty European cities which connect to Abu Dhabi is impressive coverage for most carriers. The range of destinations reveal as much about Etihad's aggressive acquisition strategy over the last decade as the connectivity to the continent. 

Etihad today has stakes in Alitalia (hence Milan and Rome), Air Berlin (hence the flight into Düsseldorf), Air Serbia (how else to explain the flight to Belgrade) and completely rebranded Swiss regional airline Darwin into Etihad regional, which interconnects the center of Europe. 

As interesting as this somewhat incongruous string of purchases is, it begins to make for a very messy map. There are far more blue "partner" flights on this small inset graphic than the single fan of bright red links to Abu Dhabi. Together it makes the route map much too busy and challenging to read: even the black city labels in Central Europe are nearly blotted out. 

Emirates Route Map, August 2016: Europe

A thick baobab trunk of routes juts up from Mesopotamia, spreading its boughs across the European continent. With a staggering 37 European destinations, Emirates has blanketed the region with flights even more so than any other portion of the globe, from Moscow to Manchester, Milan to Malta, Madrid to Munich. The depth of its reach is shown in secondary and tertiary markets: Prague, Budapest, Geneva, Lyon, Nice, Oslo, Glasgow, Bologna, and Hamburg are just a handful of third-tier cities which see a wide-body Emirates plane land daily, non-stop from Dubai.

Tunisair: The Routes from Germany, Summer 2015

Last month turned into quite a curation of Germanic aviation, and the Timetablist archives still yield a few more items along the same theme to start this month.

Tunisair published this table in the summer of 2015 specifically for its German-speaking and German-located customers. The chart details the Tunisian flag carrier's array of services from multiple German gateways to multiple destinations in Tunisia. The flights were operated with narrow-bodied B737s and A320s (which is all Tunisair had up until recently). Most flights to Tunisia were to the capital, Tunis, and most were originating from Frankfurt, with a daily flight in each direction. There were also frequent series from Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin Schönefeld to Tunis, Enfidha and Djerba–the latter two airports, gateways to the famed Mediterranean beaches of Tunisia, mostly connected on weekend leisure schedules. This post is the first time that Enfidha has been featured on the Timetablist.

Lufthansa: The Lost Russian Service, Summer 2012

Related to the post from last week about the withdrawal of Aeroflot's flights from Berlin-Tegel, the archival stacks of the Timetablist revealed a near-vintage item of relevance: a Lufthansa Systemwide Timetable from June-October 2012, graphically executed in the neat, straightforward Teutonic presentation that is classic Lufthansa—but issued only as a PDF instead of a bulkier booklet, a customer (and aviation nerd) service that, somewhat amazingly, Lufthansa still provides on its website. 

Although just four years old, the reference in the Timetablist library features over a dozen destinations that have since been terminated. In particular, Lufthansa has retreated remarkably from Russia, a zone it made great efforts to penetrate in the 1990s and 2000s. Relatedly included: LH's lost service from Munich to Donetsk, the metropolitan area of 2 million in eastern Ukraine which is now self-proclaimed as independent, which caused Lufthansa to withdraw in 2014. A year earlier, the thrice-weekly Frankfurt-Perm-Kazan operation was closed and then separately Yekaterinburg was dropped in December due to lack of profitability. 

The following year, services to Samara, Nizhniy Novgorod, and all flights to Moscow Vnukovo were curtailed (Lufthansa now only flies to Domodedovo). 

While several major non-Russian carriers still serve many of these airports—notably Turkish Airlines, which overtook Lufthansa to become now the largest foreign carrier in Russia—the disappearance of Lufthansa from secondary centers in Russia is an undeniable loss of prestige for these cities, and an evident effect of the decline of Russia's political and commercial ties with Germany. 2012 might not be that long ago, but much has changed. 

Air Berlin: Berlin to Chicago and New York, July 2015

A last item in the series of box-light billboard adverts at Berlin Tegel last summer: one of the undoubted pride of the German capital's operations, the hometown Air Berlin's widebody non-stops to Chicago and New York JFK. As mentioned earlier this week, Berlin has somewhat curious commercial aviation arrangements. These reflect in turn, the situation in the largely decentralized Germany as a whole, for that matter, where the dominant flag-carrier Lufthansa somewhat underserves large metro areas like Hamburg and the Rhein-Ruhr by concentrating a classic hub-and-spoke system in all-powerful Frankfurt and the highly-important but rather out-of-the-way Munich. This leaves the country's largest urban center and unquestionably one of the most important capitals of Europe with only a handful of long-haul options. 

Onurair: Now Connecting to Turkey, July 2015

 Just as yesterday's post debuted a secondary Turkish airline connecting at Istanbul, today consists of another inaugural feature on the Timetablist: an advertisement of Onurair, yet another Kemalist carrier with a bland name and even more generic red logo. Marketed to hurried passengers at the tiny passenger terminal at Tegel Airport in Berlin, the poster excites the European traveler who wishes to reach Asia Minor—from large tourism gateways like Izmir, Bodrum and Antalya to more minor Anatolian destinations like Diyarbakir, Kayseri, and Gaziantep, all, apparently via Atatürk Airport. The journey can originate from major European hubs like Amsterdam and Berlin or secondary cities such as Stuttgart and Düsseldorf, to more obscure links such as Odessa and Nicosia. 

El Al: Boston to Tel Aviv Non-stop, June 2015

In just the last four years, starting in about 2012, Boston's Logan International Airport has seen one of the most astonishing periods of international traffic growth in the history of American aviation. In a startlingly compacts period of time, beginning with JAL's dreamliner service to Narita in April 2012, Logan's somewhat pedestrian terminal E has seen an astonishing addition of new tail fins—especially those running long- and ultra-long haul intercontinental flights from New England: Hainan, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, COPA, Aeromexico, Turkish, and WOW Air. These are now being joined by Norwegian, Qatar Airways, Eurowings, Air Berlin, SAS, Thomson Airways and TAP Air Portugal, in addition to new services by Jetblue, Logan's de facto hub airline. 

Last year, in mid-2015, El Al was a somewhat unlikely participant in this onrush. The Israeli flag carrier launched a thrice-weekly B767-300 non-stop to the Holy Land gateway, Ben Gurion International Airport. This print ad, boasting a beachy scene of Tel Aviv's skyscraper-studded riviera, featured in Boston magazine ahead of the first flight. Likely paid for by Massport as part of the incitement package offered to El Al to secure and support the service. Whatever the state agency has been doing, it's been doing it right. 

Sabena Network: c.1955

Post-war, pre-jet age Sabena still had an impressive reach, with a dense network in Europe spinning out from the low countries northward to Oslo and Stockholm and east to Prague and Vienna. A single westward push stopped at Shannon before destinations unspecified in North America.

Southward, planes reached the Mediterranean at Nice, and stretched further down to Lisbon where a vague connection to South America is suggested. More articulated is the operation at Rome, with planes splitting off for North Africa,  the first crossing the Sahara to stop at Kano before finally reaching the vast Belgian Congo at Leopoldville. A non-stop from Brussels reached into the upper reaches of the Congo to terminate at Elisabethville and Stanleyville, and a single lined continued all the way down to Johannesburg.

In the east, flights criss-crossed at Athens, only reaching Tel Aviv in the Near East, with another flight to Cairo, which turned down to also reach the eastern cities of the colony.

Afriqiyah Airways Network, 2011

A destination map of sorts, printed on the window shade of the Afriqiyah Airways ticket office, which now sits fading in the West African sun as the airline vacated in the office some time in 2011 due to its global grounding as a result of the Libyan revolution.

Previous to its sudden suspension, Afriqiyah was a surging force in trans-African transportation, connecting via its main hub at Tripoli to 14 West and Central African destinations as well as Johannesburg, transferring these intercontinental services to an array of European cities, from Düsseldorf to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Rome, as shown here, although the labels for each red dot are scattered, with Jeddah off the coast of Australia, Bangui near Antarctica, Ouagadougou and N'Djamena in the Indian Ocean, Khartoum at the Maldives, Abidjan near the Falklands, Kinshasa near Cape Town, Niamey near the Cape Verde Islands, Rome near Arkhangelsk, London north of Greenland.

Farther afield, Afriqiyah flew to a handful of Asian destinations: Jeddah and Dubai, predictably, somewhat randomly to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and distant Beijing.

Since the partial cessation of hostilities in still-volatile post-Qaddafi Libya, Afriqiyah has operated a diminished network, with services to Jeddah, Düsseldorf, London but not a single sub-Saharan city.

Arrivals at Dresden International, August 2013

The television arrivals screen at Dresden airport in Germany on a Friday in August of 2013, showing many internal flights on Lufthansa from Munich and Frankfurt, and on Air Berlin from Düsseldorf.  Easyjet has a single service on the board from Basel. Air Berlin also flies in from Antalya, Turkey, and Germanwings arrives from Cologne with an earlier service in from Corfu, which is not the sole Greek Isle connection shown on the board, as there is a later charter arrival on Pegasus from Kos.

Turkish Airlines: the German destinations, 2013

In addition to its impressive array of African destinations, Turkish Airlines, now the world's seventh largest carrier, is heavily focussed on services to Germany, principally given the large number of Turkish immigrants, so it offers flights to a dozen German cities, in many cases offering some of the few services outside of the European Union from smaller airports such as Bremen, and tiny Friedrichshafen on the Bodensee. Most flights are to Istanbul Ataturk. Larger urban centers, including Düsseldorf, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt host multiple, daily operations to a half dozen Turkish cities, including leisure destinations like Antalya as well as secondary urban centers such as Adana and Trabzon.

Ghana International Airlines: Accra, London, Düsseldorf, c.2009

After the demise of Ghana Airways, furtive attempts were made to keep a Black Star flag carrier in the skies. From 2005-2010, Ghana International Airlines was an attempt to fill that role, with a single B757 flying weekly between Accra and London Gatwick, with a stop in Düsseldorf, Germany, which has a particularly sizable population of Ghanaians. Apparently there was also a service to Johannesburg, at least according to Wikipedia. This advert was from c.2009, the airline's last full year of operations.

Air Malta: Routes Serviced, April-October 2011

A table of Air Malta weekly flights, showing 34 airports Malta's flag carrier serves on its own each week in the summer, and also 12 airports served by one of several partner airlines such as bmi, Brussels Airlines and Etihad. The airline serves a large number of cities in both Italy and Germany (including Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, and Stuttgart), connecting several cities from each country every day to the Mediterranean island. There are no services to anywhere in nearby North Africa, however.

Aegean Airlines: The Western European Routes, Summer 2012

The route map of Aegean Airlines, the private Greek carrier that has zoomed from Start-up to Star Alliance member in a matter of years. Solid-lines denote year-round services, mainly from Athens but also to Germany (Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Munich) from Thessaloniki, while dashed-lines indicate summer service, which includes flights from Heraklion to Paris, Brussels and Munich.

Ghana Airways: Düsseldorf-Accra and all of West Africa, c.1990

A cartoon DC-10 smiles from a German-language Ghana Airways sticker celebrating Ghana Airways service from Düsseldorf to Accra sometime around 1990. The state airline stretched from Westphalia to West Africa nearly until its demise, serving the burgeoning immigrant communities of the Rhine region as one of the airline's few European destinations (London Gatwick was consistently the other, which it sometimes flew to via Germany).