Frankfurt Airport Departures, August 2012

Just twenty minutes of mid-weekday activity at Frankfurt Airport in late August 2012, showing departures (mostly of Lufthansa, naturally) as near as Salzburg and as far away as Kuala Lumpur on Malaysia Airlines and Charlotte on USAirways.

Belleair Network, January 2011

A two-page spread from Belleair's in-flight magazine features the Albanian airlines's somewhat aspirational route map of Europe. Existing destinations--presumably all from Tirana--are some twenty Italian airports plus Stuttgart, Zurich, Liege in Belgium, and Pristina, in Kosovo. These are surrounded by a number of other capitals, which are given equal billing but designated with yellow and blue points. These are charter destinations (in blue) and "future destinations" (in yellow)-- what plans are in the works to reach Dortmund or Dresden, Maastricht or Malmö is not made clear, but the lovely cursive script at upper left declares that Belleair is "growing together."

Alitalia: Domestic Routes, c.1969

The national network of Alitalia around 1969, sporting the "ATI" (Aero Transporti Italia) emblem at top. With its "barbell" pattern of centers at Rome and Milan, and a large number of routes out of Naples, Turin, and Venice, the system connected more than a dozen airports on the mainland boot and multiple cities on the large islands of Sicily and Sardinia, as well as the smaller and more distant Pantelleria and Lampedusa.

A box at lower-right shows a zoomed-in route map for Elivie, the helicopter-line subsidiary of Alitalia, which ran passenger operations out of Naples to Capri and Ischia. If this item is correctly dated to 1969, it would be the last year of Elivie's operations, which was closed in 1970.

Malev: The Italian Routes, c.1974

Another iteration of a previously-featured series of postcard route maps for Malév Hungarian Airlines, which sadly ceased flying this morning after 66 years of continuous operation. Here were the two principal routes from Budapest Ferihegy to Italy, one route to Milano, the other, via Florence, to Rome. both routes stopped in Zagreb and Venice, splitting at Ferrara.