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. 

El Al: 3 times weekly to Boston, June 2015

Banner ads have started appearing for El Al's latest expansion into the United States market: thrice-weekly flights from Tel Aviv to Boston, beginning in June of this year.  El Al apparently served Logan Airport in previous decades, but it's return is part of the remarkable intercontinental expansion from Logan, which has seen the airport go from flights almost exclusively to Europe and Caribbean to non-stops to Tokyo on JAL, Beijing (and also in June Shanghai) on Hainan—these three all with the B787 Dreamliner,—as well as Emirates to Dubai, Turkish to Istanbul, and Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, which begins in May. Copa Airlines recently started flights to Boston, and Aeromexico resumes non-stop flights to Mexico City starting in May as well.

JAL: San Francisco-Tokyo Haneda on the Dreamliner: The quickest way to Metropolitan Tokyo, 2014

JAL may have the fastest service on board brand-new planes, opening up frontiers in intercontinental flights from the here-to-fore mostly domestic airport at Haneda to California aboard a brand-new B787 Dreamliner, but it certainly has chosen a World Wide Web 1.0 fashion to publicize its pioneering: this banner advert looks like it was made in about 1998.

Scheduled Passenger Routes from Hawaii, 1971: West of the Dateline

Examining the left-hand side of the same map from the previous post, a State Department of Transportation map from 1971-2. There are many flights between Hawaii and Australia, connecting nonstop from Honolulu to Brisbane and Sydney, as well as Auckland, while connecting New Caledonia and Fiji along the way and with Melbourne as an onward destination. The  trans-Micronesia service is shown in special green, dipping down to Nauru, with a major west Pacific base at Guam, which connects onward to Manila, Hong Kong, and Taipei. Tokyo and Okinawa are served non-stop.

Its somewhat difficult to discern which routes certain airlines, listed above, served at the time, especially BOAC and VARIG; Pan Am likely served many of these flights.

American Airlines Announces Japan Airlines's New Dreamliner Service from Tokyo to Boston, April 2012

Typical of American Airlines's outdated branding, this email announcement to frequent fliers, despite its exciting news, makes for mediocre viewing. Not much thought was put into the visuals, a Disneyesque combination of faux-calligraphic typeface and dull-blue photograph of a snow-capped Mount Fuji. Its obvious from this that Tokyo is the destination at hand.

Indeed, Japan Air Lines's announcement of nonstop service between Narita and Boston, the first ever such connection, and the first nonstop flight of an Asian carrier into Logan in over ten years (from the days when Korean Air ran a Seoul-Boston-Washington Dulles triangle), is one of the most exciting develops in intercontinental service to the US that has been announced for 2012. That a brand-new B787 will run the route is even more compelling. Yet American somehow fumbles again, with its incorrect statement that "we now offer the first nonstop route between Boston and Asia" which also confusingly suggests that silver American metal will make the journey, when American is far from enjoying any brand-new Dreamliners, and anyway most passengers would strongly prefer JAL to AA.

JAL: Destinations from Kuala Lumpur, c. 1960

A listing of Japan Air Lines connections from Kuala Lumpur, c. 1960, with office address and telephone number.

JAL to America, Winter 2002

This second JAL page reveals more history of American Airlines than Japan Air Lines. This table shows American's erstwhile transpacific routes from San Jose and Seattle to Narita, as well as the ill-fated Osaka-Dallas/Fort Worth service. JAL is, sadly, planning to retreat from its Tokyo-Sao Paulo service in the future as it deals with its financial woes.

JAL to Hawaii, Winter 2002

This is the first true "timetable" posted on the Timetablist. This dense matrix is from the Japan Air Lines (JAL) booklet distributed for 1 Jan to 31 March 2002, and shows a squadron of widebodies, both JAL and JALways, from eight Japanese cities to Honolulu as well as a Narita-Kona service. JAL is probably the world's most suffering major carrier at present, which is something of a mystery, as it dominates the domestic and international networks of the world's second largest economy. The Japan-Hawaii timetable is quite thin today, with only three scheduled destinations: Nagoya, Kansai, and Narita, while JALways operates charters from some 17 cities. JAL is also withdrawing from other routes between now and 2012.