Service from Malta to Tunis and Tripoli, Summer 2011

Malta, the European Union's smallest member, is a tiny rocky archipelago in the center of the Mediterranean below Sicily. It is actually more southernly than the coast of North Africa, and acts as a European gateway to Libya especially.

Shown here on the Malta International Airport's summer 2011 timetable are weekly services to Tripoli, with an identical flight every day by Libyan Arab Airlines complimented by an array of daily flights from Air Malta, with a twice weekly connection on JAT which goes onward to Belgrade.

Above are four weekly services to Tunis, direct and also via Monastir on Servisair. All these operations increase during the summer months, as seen from the matrix at far right.

JAT Worldwide, 1970-85

JAT has always been a Timetablist favorite, if only for its dedicated attempt to access the Yugoslavian-American diaspora of the upper Midwest, where it was for a time the most exotic weekly visitor to Detroit and Cleveland Hopkins, and adding to Balkan flavor of Chicago O'Hare.

Here we find a bright blue map set, from sometime in the early 1980s or perhaps earlier, prior to its broadening of Great Lakes destinations. Its overall reach is quite impressive, a global arch with Beograd as its keystone, which turns at Shannon to stretch to Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto and New York.

Looking east, the red line bends across Europe to play the role of what has to be one of the more perculiar Kangaroo carriers, with an axis spanning Ankara- Tehran- Karachi -Bombay-Madras-Singapore and terminating at that great Yugoslav enclave of Sydney.