Athens Departure Board, 19 August 2017 (1)

 Two hours of mid-morning departures at Athens during what is by far the busiest time of year: the mid-August tourist rush. This block of flights are split between European connections: Geneva on Swiss, Istanbul on Turkish, Schönefeld and Orly on Easyjet—with a contingent of the airport's constant bank of domestic flights. 

The storied Olympic name is still in use—a brand bought out of bankruptcy and now operating as only a prop-plane domestic carrier—with flights to Heraklion, Santorini, Kalamata in southwestern Peleponnese, and a squadron of Cycladic flights all departing at 10:40 to spread to Naxos, Paros, Mykonos and the Ionian isle of Zakynthos. 

Olympic is not alone in the Greek domestic airspace: smaller private upstart Ellinair links to the northern secondary city of Thessaloniki, where is has its home base. Romanian low-cost airline Blue Air flies to the world's only other Greek-speaking state, Cyprus, and its main airport at Larnaca. There is a second flight to Larnaca at 10:35, showing a codeshare with Air Canada. This is on Aegean, which is today the de facto Greek flag carrier and parent company to Olympic. The extent of Aegean's pan-European reach is indicated by the less-common destinations on the board: Dubrovnik and Lisbon. 

Aviogenex System Route Map, c.1989

An undated route map, found in a dusty display case on the upper level of the Aeronautical Museum of Yugoslavia on the grounds of Aerodrom Nikola Tesla in Belgrade, Serbia. A conventional map of Europa is overlaid with the red lines of the complete Aviogenex system during the Yugoslavian airline's prime. Although a subsidiary of the Belgrade-based Generalexport conglomerate (as the map prominently notes at the bottom), the leisure airline's impressive array of coverage emanated out of the Croatian coast, with the largest bases at Pula in Istria, and Split and Dubrovnik in Dalmatia, marked by large red bullseyes around their place names. Other large stations at Zadar and inland at Zagreb and Ljubljana and what looks to be Titograd (today Podgorica, Montenegro).

From here, the red-striped Aviogenex jets plunged further south across the Mediterranean from Algiers to Benghazi to Beirut. A single branch outward from Zagreb splays outward and off the map (to what is probably Aqaba, Jordan) and turns northeastward to spread to Leningrad, Helsinki, and Oslo.

Aviogenex was even more impressive in northwestern Europe, with intense coverage of Germany, France and especially the British Isles. So dense was this network that it demanded a unique cartographic feature of this map, as Aviogenex's home hubs in the Balkans had to been repeated at the mouth of the English Channel, underneath Ireland, to adequately show the web of connections to 16 cities. These included not just Birmingham and Leeds (as with the rest of the map rendered in Croatian Latin script, here spelled "Lidz") but many smaller airports such as Cardiff, Bristol, Bournemouth and Norwich. Perhaps most intriguing is what appears to be Kirkwall Airport in the Orkney Islands, which even today in the great Thomas Cook package tour era of cheap charters is not connected to the Canaries or Balearics, much less Montenegro.

This is reflective of the enormous popularity of Yugoslavia as a British tourism destination in the 1980s, when it was even more popular than Spain and Yugotours was one of the UK's most popular tour agencies, which all declined with the 1990s break-up and war. While Aviogenex was not a victim of this catastrophe, it was shadow of its former self and limped along until 2015, meeting its demise just before the latest explosion in Adriatic leisure aviation.

Ukraine International Airlines Network, c.2010-11

Ukraine International Airlines is not to be confused with Air Ukraine International, which once reached as far as New York but later failed. The above images are from a recent, well-designed card showing its route network across Europe and into Southwest Asia, from Amsterdam to Almaty. Note in particular the connections between the secondary cities of Lvov and Donetsk with Italy, Barcelona, Split, and other Mediterranean leisure destinations.

The next post will show a detail of its western European spread.

Spanair: International Routes from Barcelona, 2011

Where the previous post's graphic of Spanair's reach from El Prat was fanciful, this is more straightforward: a map of the wide array of Spanair non stops from Barcelona, reaching three continents, including two Sub-Saharan routes to Banjul and Bamako. Prior to its demise, Spanair was expanding rapidly across Africa, although the airline's Wikipedia entry, which lists Dakar and Malabo (but not Banjul) overstates the reach, and seems to conflate Air Europa (which formerly served Malabo and still flies to Dakar) and Spanair. It matters less now, in the wake of Spanair's demise; whatever the destinations, tens of thousands are currently stranded.

Lufthansa: New Flights from Munich, Summer 2011

Munich is one of Lufthansa's two "fortress hubs." Although much smaller than the massive megahub at Frankfurt, Munich Airport is important for both Lufthansa's links between North America, Asia and Europe on its own craft and with its Star Alliance partners, as well as origin-and-destination traffic serving the large multinationals in southern Germany, and the leisure needs of their well-off employees.

This is reflected in Lufthansa's summer announcement of new services from Munich: link Zadar and Dubrovnik in Croatia will ferry holidaymakers to the rocky resorts of the Dalmatian Coast, whereas a widebody such as the A340 shown will connect to the South American Star Alliance superhub of Sao Paulo-Guarlhos.

Malev: The Southeast European Routes, c. 1974

Following on the previous post, this second, equally-vivd postcard shows Malev's Balkan routes, which interestingly bypass the region's capitals (Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Zagreb) in favor of seaside leisure destinations along the Black Sea and that great Venetian fortress on the Adriatic: Dubrovnik. Perhaps the major cities were unserved, or perhaps this placard was meant to entice the socialist holiday-maker. Like the other item, each city is paired with an illustrated scene, further marketing each city as a vacation spot.