Imperial Airways Network, 1937: All Destinations

At the lower-left of the Imperial Airways route map, a round globe, the meridian region in front and daytime, the far east behind in the dark, shows, in simplified form, labelling each and every way station from Britain to South Africa and New South Wales. It is both so much clearer, and so much more complete, than the larger map, it is enough to wonder why the whole map was designed like this in the first place. 

Imperial Airways, 1937: The African Routes

As with its trans-Asian operations shown yesterday, the technology available to Imperial Airways in the early age of aviation necessitated a series of regular way stations for the royal charter's southerly system spanning Africa.

After the upper Nile, the line made its way to Khartoum, whence it splits, with one line turning to the west: Kano—Lagos—Accra and finally Takoradi, which only has domestic links today. There must have been pitstops in the drylands of French Central Africa but these are unnamed here; the paths of the green routes, connecting Algeria and Morocco to Niger and then the Congo, and reaching across to Madagascar, suggest French operations.

Continuing to follow the Nile south, the Cairo-to-Cape line stopped at Malakal, toady in South Sudan, then fanned across British East Africa in a complex web which appears to shown that one set of services remained inland along the Great Rift, passing through Nairobi on the way to Lusaka, Salisbury (today Harare) and Bulawayo in Rhodesia, and  then finally ending at Johannesburg. 

Another schedule reached the Swahili coast at Mombasa—Dar Es Salaam—(Ma)lindi and coastal Mozambique, with a bridge connection through Nyasaland at Blantyre, passing through Lourenço Marques (today Maputo) to terminate at Durban. The unlabeled green lines with the Union clearly suggest an early-stage South African Airways, reaching both Cape Town and Windhoek. 

Imperial Airways: The Empire Route, 1937

Continuing from yesterday's post, Imperial Airways's great Empire Route across south Asia and on to Australia features a number of small way stations which could hardly be found on a map today, much less having any import to commercial aviation. 

While Allahabad, in Uttar Pradesh, at least has an airport to this day, it is only served by a commuter connection from Delhi. Gwadar, the once-great Omani port of Baluchistan, is likewise a tiny regional airport today. In northwesternmost Burma, Akyab, known today as Sittwe, is similarly linked only to Yangon by regional airlines, although it has retained the original airport code AKY.

Somewhat bucking this trend is Koepang, in the pre-war era the next stop after Batavia (today Jakarta) and the largest city on Indonesian (west) Timor, which today hosts an active regional airport.

In Australia itself, tiny Normanton, Queensland, today has no air service and is best known for its historic, gold-rush era railway. Cloncurry, Queensland is likewise today a remote outpost without any air service. The third and final Queensland outpost before the coast, Charleville, retains an airport today, with Qantaslink service into Brisbane. 

Note that the map appears to keep some stations unlisted: it certainly appears that the trunk route makes a turn at Bangkok, but this is unlabeled, and there is an even more meandering line through Indochina up to Hong Kong, but no stops are shown here. 

Imperial Airways: The Worldwide Routes, 1937

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection is one of the world's great cartographic archives; with over 150,000 items in its holdings at Stanford University. Fully searchable and viewable online, it is a wonderful resource. 

The last post, with the global-projection map of Oman Air, has some affinity with the earliest route maps at the down of the pre-war commercial aviation era, specifically this detailed item showing the Air Lines of Imperial Airways in 1937, at an extent which would not be resurrected until after World War Two. 

What is particularly remarkable about this map is how complex it is, with two world projections duplicating similar information, which itself is intertwined with many various, and vaguely articulated 'cooperation' operations carried out by unnamed 'other air transport companies.' 

As expected, the trunk routes of the empire fan out from London, with a trans-European line spanning Central Europe to terminate at Budapest, while a second, trans-Mediterranean line runs from Marseille to Athens to Mirabella (today known as Elounda) in Crete, finally crossing the greater part of the middle sea to reach first Alexandria and then Cairo, from whence the great route begins to touch at way-stations within Britain's various post-Ottoman holdings in the Near East, and ultimately eastward to the major outposts of Empire in India, Malaya, and Australia, as we will see in the next post. 

A second line continues southward toward Luxor, continuing onwards to Sub-Saharan Africa, which a subsequent post will examine in detail.