Qatar Airways Worldwide Network, 2011. Detail # 1: The Gulf Region & Western Hemisphere

Continuing from the last post, here is the first in a series of posts about Qatar Airways from back in 2011, when it began on to nip at the heels of super-rival Emirates, chasing that megacarrier to all corners of the globe in the formative decades of the ME3. 

Origin & destination traffic is not nearly as important as making Doha a global megahub like Dubai, even before the state-of-the-art Hamad International Airport even opened. Hence, early extension all the way to Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo, as well as a fledgling operation to the four United States gateways, with Chicago in bright green, either as a cargo destination or in anticipation of its 2012 announcement of its new thrice-weekly passenger service which began in November 2013. These all connect with Qatar's regional, "Intra-Gulf" network—a triangle of cities between Kuwait, Muscat and Jeddah.

While only showing 14 cities on 3 continents on this page, dozens of other dots sprout across North America—presumably code-share connections although the map does not bother to explain.

Uganda Airlines: Current and Future Routes, 2025

Although of the same name as the flag carrier featured in yesterday's post, Uganda Airlines of the 21st century is a new government venture, founded in 2018 and with first flights launched in August 2019.

The state enterprise received a pair of ultramodern A330-800s in December of 2020, which allowed the airline to spread its wings to Dubai and Mumbai. The first route faces stiff competition from both an Emirates B777 and flyDubai. The widebodies are also used on more medium routes such as its only West African operation: Entebbe-Abuja-Lagos-Entebbe. 

The above pair of maps, from the airline's website, are somewhat curious graphics. The top image is labeled as showing Uganda Airline's existing destinations, while clicking the "View Planned Routes" button brings up the second image below. 

Although the geographically proficient can easily decipher the destination dots, it is strange that they are not labeled automatically. Even more incongruously, Uganda's ambition to reach London has already been realized, as there is a multi-week service to Gatwick with the A330s, which began in May this year. The website has simply not been updated. 

This prestigious long-haul joins the other showcase routes, and the regional network that includes Nairobi, Mombasa, Mogadishu, Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar, Juba, and Kinshasa, as well as the important southern African route to Johannesburg. These links are run with the airline's CRJ regional jets, which is perhaps surprising for Johannesburg especially, that it doesn't see the widebodies. More recently, a 9-year old Danish-registered A320 joined the fleet, and makes appearances on the South Africa route. 

The future route map is more accurate in that Jeddah, Guangzhou, Lusaka and Harare have not yet been realized. Note that neither map features Abuja, either. 
 

Air Liban to Europe and Africa, c.1952

 Prior to becoming Middle East Airlines, the flag carrier of Lebanon was known as Air Liban. Formed in 1945, it quickly expanded across Southwest Asia, Europe and into Africa as reflected in the destination list on this vintage brochure: Near East destinations include Aleppo and Baghdad, and fourth city is listed Jerusalem—a somewhat remarkable historical phenomenon, although this likely references the old Atarot Airport, at the time located in the Jordanian-annexed West Bank. Regardless, "Jerusalem" makes its Timetablist debut here. 

Further into the Gulf extends a spine of Jeddah—Dhahran—Doha—Kuwait; it is important to realize that, long before the rise of thee Gulf super-carriers, MEA/Air Liban was the primary airline of the Arab World, as its expansive name implies. 

Looking Westward, Air Liban ran its "swift Super DC-6C planes" to Nicosia, Ankara, Istanbul and to its only Western European capital, Paris, while send a second route to Cairo and Tripoli, with its most southernly service across the Red Sea to Khartoum, then spanning the vast Sahara to reach Kano, Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, and finally terminating at Dakar. This unusual number of West African destinations linked the Syrian-Lebanese commercial diaspora of coastal urban West Africa to their homeland. 

Libyan Arab Airlines Network, 1977

Following on from the previous post, here is a newspaper advertisement for Libyan Arab Airlines from a few years later, which centers around substantially the same route map from 1974, but without the excursion across the Sahara (no Khartoum, Agadez, nor Niamey), with only the addition of Frankfurt, Damascus and Jeddah in the intermittent years, and with Geneva substituted by Zürich.

The map is also, except for Sebha, absent the extensive domestic network—perhaps not provided for this circumstance, which appears to be aimed at the business traveler to the "Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" —"*Libya1 flies the best reasons," it declares, boasting of its 40x weekly Tripoli-Benghazi shuttle service, its "whisper" quiet B-727-200s, and its growth rate. The copy concludes with the emphatic: "We are Libya 1." which isn't precisely grammatically correct. 

Nigeria Airways: The Right Connections for Nigeria and West Africa, May 1979 (1 of 2)

Having now extensively reviewed the myriad airlines of contemporary and recent Nigeria, this New Year's Day we look back almost forty years to the era of the Winged Elephant, when the green-striped jets of Nigeria Airways ruled the skies.

Similar to previous features on The Timetablist, the national carrier was seeking the discerning eye of the Air Transport World reader in May, 1979, boasting of its "luxurious DC10," to "the nerve center of business in Africa," Lagos, but also throughout West Africa, as is helpfully shown in the route map at lower left.

What is today an aviation market arranged around the twin poles of Lagos and Abuja was, before Abuja was realized, organized between the southern hub of Lagos and the northern gateway of Kano, from whence intercontinental flights crossed the Sahara to European metropoles, including Rome and Amsterdam, but likewise eastward to the Middle East; the Kano—Jeddah link was recently revived but in those days the operation had the somewhat unusual final termination point of Karachi. A sort of code share, presumably on Egyptair, linked Cairo—Athens. Note also the cross-border link from Kano to Niamey, Niger. 

There was a second non-stop to London from Lagos, but mostly this was the start of the coastal routes along West Africa's edge, Cotonou—Lomé—Accra—Abidjan—Monrovia, where the widebody headed nonstop for New York JFK, while the smaller elements of the fleet linked Freetown—Banjul—Dakar and back in a minihub. There was a nonstop from Lagos to Douala, and also a connection to southeastern Calabar, as well as flights to Libreville and Nairobi. 

Med-View Airline: Lagos to Jeddah, November 2017

An enticing picture of the corniche of Jeddah glows from Med-View Airline's social media accounts a year on from the previous post. However, Med-View does not serve Jeddah directly from Lagos; instead the connection is Kaduna—Kano—Jeddah, resurrecting Kano's former role as the northern international gateway for all of Nigeria. 

Supplementally confusing is the city list at the bottom; while the destinations listed there are among those Med-View serves, several of them (Enugu, Ilorin, Owerri, and Port Harcourt) including many of the more ambitious (Baltimore, Houston, Johannesburg, Lisbon) are not served by the airline, and no plans have been announced. This, too, is reminiscent of earlier episodes in Nigeria's airline history. 

Air Afrique: The Four Continent Route Map, 1987.

Fitting to end this year's Air Afrique Week with one of the most magnificent items of the airline's heritage that this blog has been able to feature: a 1987 route map, found recently on the wall of a travel agency in Dakar, Senegal. 

The Map is based on a popular wall map that was widely distributed in the 1980s, and although strikingly colorful it is not particularly faithful to terrain or topography. It is generally a poor decision to begin a route map from a conventional map, as generally the original cartographer has already displayed a surfeit of information which is extraneous to displaying the airline's route system. 

While that is especially true in this case, as a Mercator Projection version of this map is thoroughly critiqued on this cartography blog, in this case the trouble is greatly mitigated by the use of white route lines against the dark, natural palette of the oceans and continents. 

Being itself a wall-sized poster, this map is also large enough to visually convey the complex network of Air Afrique to the observer by its scale. Beyond the dense interlacing of its regional network (which will be more thoroughly examined in a separate, subsequent post) what is immediately evident are the long haul connections to other continents.

Chief among these are the many Trans-Saharan routes to France, especially the fountain shower emanating out of Paris: Bordeaux, Abidjan, Lome, Ouagadougou, Marseille, Lyon, Ouagadougou, Rome, N'Djamena, and Bangui. 

The interior connections to southernly French cities was surely a stop-over operation: Bamako is connected only to Lyon and Marseille, for instance. Likewise, follow the many lines to see how Niamey, was linked to all three secondary French cities, including, apparently, via Agadez (gateway to vast Areva uranium mine that fuels most of France's public power utility) but not directly to Paris non-stop. Interestingly, one of the other cities not directly connected to Paris is one of the airline's main hubs: Dakar, which seems to be linked only via Nouakchott. or one of several other European cities. 

These latter elements—Dakar to Bordeaux, Geneva, Rome, and Marseille— are separated out from the crowd by swinging in a dramatic, centripetal fashion westward, well over the North Atlantic. The only route to the west of this is reverse-S curve Dakar—New York service. As has been stated many times before during our Air Afrique weeks, as much prestige as the multiple routes to the metropole afforded, it was this lone transatlantic operation that was the flagship pride of the consortium. 

It is easy in this rendering to overlook the other bell of Air Afrique's dual-hub network: Abidjan, whose ribboning loops link it across the region and again to Lyon, Marseille, Geneva, Bordeaux and again to Paris itself. The last intercontinental element is eastward endeavor from Chad to Jeddah, a nod to the pilgrimage traffic of so many Sahelians. 

The following post will focus on the regional route network. 

Kenya Airways: The Return of Bangui, November 2015

The last two posts have brought us to the Sahelian-Sudan region, a generally quiet corner of aviation history. Back in 2015, Kenya Airways, generally one of the powerhouses of the sub-Saharan skies, re-launched its flight to Bangui, in the Central African Republic, which it had suspended for more than three years due to the political crisis in the country, which resulted in U.N. intervention. KQ maintains direct flights from Nairobi JKIA to nearly two-thirds of the capitals of Africa; its many destinations are not labeled here and, confusingly are shown slightly out of place: Dakar a bit too north of where it should be, Johannesburg not quite south enough, Maputo too inland. It is easier in this map to see Jeddah, Dubai, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and even Mahe and Antananarivo. With the route network misaligned with the underlying geography, many cities can only be guessed at. 

Sudan Airways: 20th Anniversary Cover, December 1967

The Imperial Airways posts this week concluded back in the historic Sudan, colocating with this colorful Sudanese envelope from thirty years later. The tri-color celebratory cover itself offers the route map of Sudan Airways, with twelve destinations from London to Beirut to Nairobi shown in bright, wide red bands, while a dozen other airfields, mostly configured in a latitudinal axis from Fort Lamy to Jeddah to Aden, seem secondary in blue. There isn't a map legend to fully explain the distinction, however. 

A quadrant of dynamic scenes, the fleet of the state carrier, soars out of the more multicolored philately at top right: a DC-3 hums across a Nilotic sunset scene; beneath, a Fokker F-27 friendship as it rides over a purple landscape, a group of nomadic camel herders below. At lower right, all the superior speed of the flagship Comet 4C accelerates into rows of contrails, what seem to be the greens and blues of the very contours of the continents rush by in a blur. 

Oman Air Route Network, December 2015: The Westward Routes

A completely thorough review of contemporary Gulf carriers must include the second-tier but rapidly growing Oman Air, which has swiftly moved from a minor regional carrier into a long-haul competitor. This spherical route map, from the airline's Wings of Oman in-flight magazine published at the end of 2015, shows six non-stops to Europe, operated variously by A330 and B787 aircraft, as well as the usual raft of regional destinations. Codeshares to Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Addis Ababa are marked in orange. 

What might be most notable about the airline's westward network are the pair of Sub-Saharan routes, both to Tanzania. An interesting fact: the capital of the Oman Empire was moved in the 19th century  Zanzibar, and there is enough trade and cultural links between ancient Muscat and the Swahili coast to maintain flights to the semi-autonomous island as well as the East African country's capital, Dar Es Salaam. Since this issue was published, Oman Air has announced new non-stops to Nairobi and Manchester. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: The GCC and South America

Like Etihad and Emirates, the ultra-long haul routes to South America are Qatar Airways rarest expeditions. A single Doha—São Paulo—Buenos Aires route makes Hamad International Airport a six-continent hub. 

Given the dearth of Latin American routes, this corner of the route map features an eye-glass inset of the GCC, showing Qatar's numerous routes to the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, which connect on Qatar to an impressive eight destinations, including Hofuf, which premieres on the Timetablist here for the first time. 

Gulf Air Network, October 2016: The Westward Routes

Continuing from the previous post, Gulf Air still has a strong presence in its home region, particularly into Saudi Arabia, with service to six cities including smaller airports like Taif and Gassim. There are also flights to three cities in Iran. Gulf Air was once a bigger actor in Eastern Africa having withdrawn from Nairobi only as recently as 2012, but today only reaches Khartoum and Addis Ababa. 

Note that the map on the last post boasted of 42 cities in 25 countries, whereas this counts 44 cities in 24 countries. 

Etihad Route Map, September 2016: the Near Asian & East African Routes

Picking up from where we left off before the end of the year, when we had exhaustively examined the redesign of Emirates Airline's route map, here is the example of its counterpart, barely 130 kms down the national highway in Abu Dhabi: Etihad, officially the national airline of the UAE. 

The smaller but, if anything, more luxurious rival connects its home base to six continents, shown here and in the next several posts of this week with an examination of its rather pedestrian route map from the September edition of its in-flight publication. 

Starting in this post, the routes radiate out from Abu Dhabi, as does every single flight of the airline. The airlines geographic extent mirrors, in lesser form, the six-continent coverage of its rival. All the usual regional capitals are served, but more often with narrow-body A320s than with the widebodies of Emirates. Equally well-covered are the south Asian gateways, economically important but also bridges to the vast majority of the UAE's foreign labor force.

We will look further east in Asia in the next few posts, but for now it is interesting to note the strong appearances in Kazakhstan. While a number of airlines fly to Almaty, the former capital and large commercial center, it is somewhat rarer to also service Astana, the new-built capital on the steppes. 

With far fewer routes to Africa than Emirates, Etihad has but one interesting distinction, if not exactly an advantage: its non-stop flight to Mahe is in cooperation with Air Seychelles, in which Eithad acquired a 40% stake.

Emirates Route Map, August 2016: The Middle East

For a long-haul, all-widebody airline, Emirates has not retreated from the short-haul demands of its home region—recognizing the feeder traffic into its immense global network (even as the immediate region is inundated with competition from other state carriers, as well as its friendly home town rivalry with low-cost FlyDubai). 

Here too, Emirates has utilized its superjumbo A380s on routes to Jeddah (three times per day), Kuwait, and, most recently, to Doha—the world's shortest A380 route. While seemingly untenable, the short operations optimize the scheduling efficiency of the ultra-long-haul behemoth.

Even where two decks of seats would be overkill, Emirates employs its B777s and A330s from Beirut to Muscat, often offering far more tickets on each flight than the competition's B737s and A320s. 

Garuda Indonesia: The International Routes, 2016

Staying in Southeast Asia as we finish up the month, it recently came to the attention of the Timetablist editorial committee that Garuda Indonesia has never been featured here before. A remarkable oversight which is today corrected with the airline's present route map.

Although the Timetablist strives to exhibit only the finest and more informative examples of airline cartography from the present and the past, all that we have available today is this extraordinarily complicated route map  from the airline's website.

While we applaud an airline which still undertakes to provide an old-fashioned route map on a website in this day and age, and we note that the batik-print of the continental landmasses here is a nice touch, the over-representation of codeshare routes muddles the instructional value of this map.

Perhaps the excess is an attempt to match the flag carrier's former glory. Having once had a wider reach and grander ambitions, Garuda endured an ignominious period as an international aviation pariah, black-listed from European Union airports from 2007 until 2009, and forced to retreat from some of its flagship routes, particularly the prestigious Los Angeles service and the Jakarta—Amsterdam trunk route to its colonial metropole along with every other inch of European airspace.

As with so many flag carriers, the contemporary iteration of Garuda is a simpler, more streamlined version, serving far fewer cities, both it is immediate region and farther afield. The triumph of the airline's renaissance has been its return to Amsterdam Schiphol, and, more recently, the reintroduction of service to London Heathrow in March of this year. Of late, management has publicly affirmed its commitment to reconnect to LAX by next year.  

That the Garuda of today only serves two European cities is nearly impossible to decipher from this route map, which shows more cities in Europe, 21, than foreign destinations that Garuda actually operates anywhere.

In truth, Garuda flies to Jeddah and Medina, (as much for the labor migration of its citizens as for holy pilgramages) and otherwise just a bare handful of east Asian megacities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. Flights out of both Jakarta and Denpasar airport on Bali to the major Australian cities of Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney cater to both tourism and business.

That's it. That is the extent of Garuda Indonesia at present. The dozens of other cities on this map are superfluous, showing codeshares and even freighter routes. In this day and age, most travelers are at least vaguely aware that an international airline cooperates with other carriers to ferry passengers beyond it own network; it is therefore completely unhelpful to show Cairo, Nairobi, Barcelona and Bahrain here. An airline's route map would best be limited to the airline's own routes, to demonstrate the actual extent of an airline's operation.

As it is, strangely random information, such as showing both “Moscow” as well as “Sheremetyevo” obscure more interesting operations such as Garuda's Jakarta—Singapore—Amsterdam—Jakarta routing and its non-stop from Medan to Jeddah. As it is, the map gives a sense that Garuda is attempting to display the wide breadth of its former glory of decades past, to the detriment of a more informative graphic.

Royal Brunei Network, c.2013

Continuing from the last post, here is another Royal Brunei route map, from some time before the flag carrier's logo changed, de-emphasizing the open-palmed crest of the Sultanate in favor of the current, boring monogram. It's often fun when pictograms stand in for cities; those here by and large stay within the pedestrian and predictable—a beefeater for London, the Merlion of Singapore, the Petronas Towers for Kuala Lumpur, a camel ride for Dubai, the Oriental Pearl TV tower for Shanghai, the skyline of Central for Hong Kong, oranutangs for Kota Kinabalu—although probably less know is the symbol Surabaya, the statue depicting the legend of the shark fighting the crocodile. Also, its unclear how Melbourne is particularly associated with a hot air balloon. 

Royal Brunei Airlines Routes, 2016

The Timetablist has featured Royal Brunei before—compare the above map, currently printed in this month's inflight magazine, with the 2011 version posted previously. This small airline of one of only two sovereign sultanates in all the world. The carrier has traditionally connected the tiny southeast Asian statelet, the only country whose territorial extent exists entirely on the island of Borneo, with the rest of east Asia, and has also long operated a route to London Heathrow via Dubai, which is today operated with the sleek B787. The non-stop flight to Jeddah is a somewhat more recent development. As recently as that last post, multiple cities in Australia were served, now the sole route is Melbourne. The inset shows some codeshare partnerships with Garuda, Thai, MAS and Turkish, although other than Istanbul, RB already flies to each destination shown. 

Lufthansa: Lost Destinations from the Summer of 2012

For space considerations, the other (non-Russian) worldly destinations that have lost their Lufthansa patronage since 2012 have been cordoned into this separate post. There are three continents hosting less Lufthansa than before, but the only mainline European city that is out is tiny Trondheim, Norway (a first for the Timetablist here), which was curiously served once a week by an aging B737-400.

Asia has been particularly affected: the long-haul connections to Jakarta (via Singapore) and Kuala Lumpur  (via Bangkok) could consistently work. More recently, Lufthansa has lost out to the Gulf three, and curtailed its dedicated flight to Abu Dhabi, and truncated the Muscat extension of its Frankfurt-Riyadh flights (although LX243, the Zürich-Dubai-Muscat connection on SWISS listed here, still operates today).

More dire but less surprising are the loss of further African services: no news that Tripoli has been abandoned, and Pointe-Noire's petrol-club PrivatAir B737-800 service via Libreville had its run, but less happy the abandonment of once-promising Asmara and long-served Khartoum, surely and sadly uneconomic nowadays.  Also, lamentably, Caracas has likewise sunk into a less-viable abyss and receives fewer and fewer international airlines.  Lufthansa closed down its Venezuelan outpost in May this year. 

RAK Airways: Closer connections from Pakistan to the Middle East, c.2011

In what is becoming something of a RAK Airways week, Timetablist follows on fro yesterday's post, mining the online archives of the defunct air carrier's Facebook page. Here is a nice advert boasting of Ras Al-Khaimah's "national airline" convenient connections between Lahore and Peshawar to the UAE, Doha, Jeddah and Kuwait, as seen through the airplane windows in the middle of the page. Prices quoted in Pakistani rupees. Cheap and cheerful for the many employment migrants from the subcontinent to the Gulf. 

RAK Airways Destinations, c.2009

The a web graphic from the erstwhile RAK Airways, showing what was probably the maximum extent of that airline's reach: a 7,000-km span across the Arab world to southern Asia, from Cairo to Calicut to Chittagong. The national airline of the emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah seemed to be marketing feeder traffic for guest workers throughout the region, sourced mainly from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Egypt. The airline's short Wikipedia page recounts the interesting saga of its launch, suspension, rebirth and second death, while the airline's Facebook page, last updated in December 2013 (shortly before the airline's final demise), has some nice photos of its pair of A320s during its 2.0 iteration. Scrolling back through the social media posts reveals that Amman and Kozhikode, not shown above, were part of the second generation. The airline's original website, meanwhile, now hosts a curious flow of long-form, contemplative text on contemporary travel. 

The airline's home base, Ras Al-Khaimah International Airport, has partially recovered from the collapse; it now hosts operations by low-cost Air Arabia and Air India Express to many of the same destinations as RAK Airways, as well as charter flights from Germany, Latvia, Poland and Russia to the hot-sand beach resorts of the northeastern United Arab Emirates.