Aeromexico: The Intercontinental Routes, December 2015

 Somehow in the storied history of The Timetableist, now approaching its 11th anniversary, the great air carrier of the Federal Republic of Mexico has never been previously featured. Continuing from the previous post, it's opportune to take the fiesta stop-over in México D.F. and look at the country's remaining flag carrier as it looked in its expansionist phase of half a decade ago.

Aeromexico runs a three-continent strategy, covering the main gateways of the Americas, switching through its central Benito Juarez hub, while stretching its reach across the oceans with what is now an all-Dreamliner fleet. Of particular interest is the triplet of Trans-Pacific efforts: Mexico City—Tokyo (Narita), Monterrey—Narita, and Mexico City—Tijuana—Shanghai—Mexico City, which neatly landed Benito Juarez at exactly the same time as it took off from Pudong International. 

According to the always reliable Wikipedia, the Monterrey—Japan service was a temporary technical stop on the way from Mexico City in lieu of Tijuana. Service today is non-stop from Mexico City only. 

In early 2017, the carrier announced a second attempt to link the northern economic powerhouse of Nuevo León with Asia: a four times weekly Mexico City—Monterrey—Incheon schedule which, like the Tokyo service, would return eastbound non-stop. Apparently this proved unnecessary, as Aeromexico still served ICN as of early 2020 but only non-stop from Mexico City. 

While this peninsular service seems to have met with success—presumably due to links with SkyTeam megacarrier Korean Air—the non-stop to Shanghai and SkyTeam partner China Eastern proved less durable, as the thrice-weekly long haul was cut in mid-2019.

Sabena: Belgian World Airlines, 1973

Continuing with the vintage global route maps of European airlines from Flickr user Caribb's incredible collection, this (unfortunately somewhat blurry) photo shows Sabena's system in its “Belgian World Airlines” prime (compare to “Italy's World Airline” in the previous posts).

Five continents are linked, which is more than today's Brussels Airlines can boast, as that airline has only recently reached New York and Washington, but as with today's successor, the flag carrier of Belgium was mostly concerned with flights within Europe and Africa. As with this week's Alitalia posts, the latter African flights will be examined in detail in a subsequent post.

For now, this pink-and-grey sub polar projection shows just a few routes to Asia and the Americas, interspersed with far too much detail of "other airlines" connecting services, which overall makes Sabena's network look much more comprehensive and makes the map much too complicated to read easily.

In North America, only New York and Montreal are served, with the latter flight continuing on to Mexico City and terminating, quite unusually, at Guatemala City. Late-terminal Sabena would serve a number of U.S. cities from Boston to Miami in the 1990s before its ignominious 2001 demise.

Further into Latin America, the South American cone is connected on a Brussels-Dakar-Buenos Aires-Santiago service, which, while definitely not the only Dakar-South America operation in aviation history, may be one of the few situations in situation that West Africa had a scheduled link with Argentina, as most such flights link to Brazil.

Looking east, Sabena maintained sizable bases in both Vienna and Athens, with flights from both cities non-stop to East and Southern Africa as well as the Near East, such as Nicosia. Moving across the Asian landmass, flights first stopped in Tehran, then Bombay, Bangkok and Singapore were all interconnected, before the network curved up through Manila to reach Tokyo, from whence Sabena curved back over the pole to return to Brussels via Anchorage, Alaska.

The extensive African network will be detailed in the following post.

Special thanks, as always, to Flickr user Caribb (Doug from Montreal) for the generous creative commons licensing which permits reposting of his collection. 

SAHSA Route Network, 1993

A luscious example of SAHSA's advertising artistry was shown in the middle of last year, but the posts moved on before this equally elegant and attractive example could be featured: an almost railroad-like vine of routes creeps out from a central spine, showing a respectable reach for such a small carrier. Tegucigalpa, the presumed hub, is shown off the the side, completely off-center, below it are the cities of the isthmus, ending at Panama. The broader boughs of the trees, spinning off the top of the network like the kicking legs of a triskelion, are the American gateways: Houston, New Orleans, and Miami, with the Caribbean stops just below, surprisingly including Grand Cayman but also the domestic destinations of Roatan, La Ceiba, and San Pedro Sula—these may had international routes as well. Guatemala City and San Salvador branch off to the far right.

A gorgeous mural of the attractions of SAHSA's network lies at the ad's base, from the skyline of Houston, the icons of Disney World and a Gone with the Wind Antebellum scene at left, to the Mayan temples of Mesoamerica at center, to the fun and sun of the warm Caribbean, a merchant ship navigating the Panama Canal at upper right.

Mexicana: The Americas Unified, 1993

Mexicana boasted of its pan-American network in 1993: stretching from Santiago to San Francisco, Caracas to Chicago, Montreal to (not quite) Montevideo. As with Eastern Air Lines, it's interesting that there are no Brazilian routes: Buenos Aires is the farthest down the cone that Mexicana reached. The inclusion of secondary cities such as San Jose, California, San Antonio and Denver is interesting, compared to the absence of larger airports such as Houston, Dallas, and Washington. There are also only three capitals of Central America in the network: Guatemala, Panama, and San Jose de Costa Rica.

SAHSA Route Network, 1993

One of the member carriers of Grupo TACA is the International Airline of Honduras, SAHSA, shown here in a lucid advertisement from late in its independent life. There are as many routes out of the Honduran resort of San Pedro Sula and the Belizean cities as there are from the capital, Tegucigalpa. Houston, New Orleans, and Miami are the US gateways, and the airline flew as far south as Panama. Interestingly, there is no service to Mexico City or Cancún, although there was a flight from the Caribbean resort town of La Ceiba to tiny, Anglophone Grand Cayman. This service, along with flights to New Orleans, did not survive the rebranding into TACA.

TACA Airlines Network, 2011

Fast-forward from the previous post, and tiny El Salvador has, through merger and might, grown to one of the largest inter-American airlines and virtually the only international airline between Mexico and Panama, with focus cities in San Jose, Costa Rica and Guatemala City. The Spanish fine print at the bottom of the map mentions the original state carriers, such as LASCA, NICA, Aviateca, and newly-formed national divisions such as TACA Perú, that form the modern airline. The latter is based from a sizable hub at Lima, detailed in the next post.

In North America, the airline runs as far northwest as San Francisco and as far northeast as Toronto, although an earlier route to Boston failed. New Orleans is gone, but Orlando and Dallas have been added, along with highly-prestigious and lucrative routes to Washington and New York. The next few posts looks at the growing airline in detail.

Aviateca Timetable and Route Map, June 1993

Continuing with our posts on service between the US and Latin America, this twenty-year old artifact of Mesoamerican aviation is presented: a full intra-American flight schedule and route map for Guatemalan state carrier Aviateca in its Late Post-Classic phase, just prior to be absorbed into the fold of Grupo TACA of neighboring El Salvador.

The schedule stretches from Chicago to Panama, as does the small map at the lower right, showing a web of routes out of Guatemala City, including an unusual route to New Orleans, which would later be rerouted to Honduras after it taken over by TACA. Unfortunately, like the airline that committed to it, the route has not survived to the present day, and New Orleans' role as a primary gateway from the Midwest to Middle America is a distant memory. But here, there is also some sort of connecting service between Louisiana and Houston, which also links with Merida, in the middle of the Yucatan. Aside from its base of operations at La Aurora, the airline held a mini-hub at Flores, gateway to Tikal in the northern Peten department, links to Cancún and Belize. In a sense, Aviateca was the airline of the Mundo Maya, even in the mid-1990s. Yet the Quetzalcoatl was not to survive as its own fleet, becoming one of the five macaws of Grupo Taca just a few years after the publication of this pamphlet.

USAirways: Ft. Lauderdale Hub, 2004

USAirways established a Caribbean basin hub in the middle of the last decade, but apparently it didn't last. Sort of a shame, and a bit unexpected in that USAirways, like other legacy carriers, has been looking to international traffic for revenue growth recently, evident in USAirway's services from Belize to Rio from its Charlotte hub, which much offer more traffic and profits.

Iberia: Western Hemisphere, February 2006

Iberia's Western Hemisphere routes in early 2006 showing, to a fault, its reliance on American Airlines to compliment its transatlantic system, particularly the radiating spokes out of Miami and Chicago. Its surprising that Iberia does not have more US destinations: nothing on the west coast, no service to Washington. Service to Boston's Logan airport has commenced since this time. Its Latin American links are proficient, but not over-abundant.

Over all, this cartography suffers from an extreme over-inclusiveness of code-share routes from American Airlines. This is further complicated by Iberia's historic base at Miami, which facilitated onward connections in Latin America. Its hard to discern among all these red lines just what IB metal serves which cities.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: Miami

If there is one region where American Airlines unquestionably dominates, it is Latin America. This bland 2002 map of American's Miami Complex shows a showering spray of routes, at lower left touching each vertebrae in the Andean spine, from the Yucatan to Tierra del Fuego, with neat vertical rows of Leeward and Windward destinations at right and lower center, with the remainder of South American supercities at bottom. A dotted line shows the codeshare with South African Airways from Miami to Cape Town and Jo'berg. London, Paris and Madrid are also served non-stop.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: LAX

Los Angeles has never been a dedicated first-tier hub for American, but the airline continues to profit from wealthy origin-and-destination traffic to far corners of its network. Shown here is a short-lived LAX-Seoul service, the only Eagle-emblazoned trans-Pacific flight; other Asian cities are linked by other carriers, as are codeshare offerings to the South Pacific with Qantas. Silver jets spread their wings  on two direct flights to the Hawaiian Islands. A measure of Meso-american non-stops links Mexican leisure destinations and capital cities. The long-range flagship services link L.A. to London and Paris.

United Air Lines: South America and Europe, 1999/2000

Two dull, monochrome, newspaper-thin, facsimile-bland maps showing United Airlines's destinations in Europe and South America during the 1999/2000 Winter season. Düsseldorf has since been dropped (its somewhat surprisingly how unsuccessful decentralization of US-German flights has been, see Lufthansa to Berlin, Delta to Stuttgart, and Emirates to Hamburg for other examples). Also United remains a presence to Brazil and Argentina, but has retreated from the Mesoamerican and Andean capitals shown here.