Kenya Airways Destinations, 2011

The back Kenya Airways boarding passes in mid-2011 boasted of that airline's expanding reach. An exhaustive array of African arrival points, from Cotonou and Monrovia in the West, to Bangui, N'Djamena and Libreville in Central Africa, to Ndola, Lubumbashi and Lilongwe to the south, as well as Indian ocean island airports such as Antananarivo, Mayotte and Seychelles added with Juba, Bujumbura, and Malindi in its own backyard. These and others are intermixed with an increasingly impressive index of intercontinental entrepôts, including Guangzhou and Muscat. The next posts records the remainder of the more than 40 cities arranged here.

Kenya Airways: The Central & West African destinations, mid-2010

This detail from the previous post shows Kenya's 13 current and 5 future Central & West African destinations, as of July 2010. All proposed routes: Bangui, Brazzaville, Kisangani, Libreville, and Ndola, have been launched as of the date of this post. The addition of dedicated routes to Brazzaville and Ndola, when nearby Kinshasa and Lubumbashi are already served, added to the addition of such secondary destinations as Bangui and Kisangani, show the thickening of Kenya's coverage and the dominance of the airline across the entire continent. The convergence of the route lines on the right-hand side of this detail indicate the vortex of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at Nairobi.

Like Delta Air Lines, its Skyteam alliance partner, Kenya has established something of a regional mini-hub at Accra Kotoka, with routes connecting to Abidjan, Freetown and Monrovia-Robertsfield.

The route lines are a bit confusing: Accra-Nairobi flights do not stop in Douala (but the flight to Douala does connect at Bangui), the Abidjan route did not land in Malabo.

Air Zaïre: Timetable of Services from Kinshasa, 1977

Continuing from the previous post, the latter portion of Air Zaïre's 1977 timetable showing services from Kinshasa shows DC-10 services to several cities in Europe, again including not only likely candidates such as Paris, but also unusual stops such as Sunday flight to Rome and stop in Madrid on the way to CDG.

Kinshasa seemed to be a budding hub in those days, making use of its natural geographic location at the center of the continent. Service to African capitals radiated in eastward and westward directions, to francophone capitals like Lomé and Libreville, but also major anglophone cities like Lagos and Nairobi, mostly using the Boeing 737s.

A host of domestic destinations included major cities like Mbuji-Mayi, Lubumbashi, and Kisangani. A number of smaller Zaïrian cities were connected to the capital and these secondary cities with the turboprop Fokker F-27 Friendship.

As mentioned previously, air service is essential to a sparsely-populated territory the size of Western Europe, with even today only a few thousand miles or paved roads. Compared to the 2009 Hewa Bora map, however, Air Zaïre of more than 30 years previous served a great many more destinations.

The above is part of the collection of Björn Larsson, and is reposted under the generous privileges of the fantastic Timetable Images website.

Please see the previous post for the first page of this timetable.

Air Zaïre: Timetable of Services from Kinshasa, 1977

The services of Air Zaïre from its home base at N'Djili Airport near Kinshasa was indexed in this straightforward timetable from 1977.

Weekly routes spread across West, Central and Eastern Africa, Dakar to Douala to Dar Es Salaam, mostly with B737s. Domestic destinations were also served with a pair of Boeing 737 jets or Fokker F-27 Friendship turboprops. A number of connections to the Great Lakes region connected in Kisangani Bangoka International Airport (FKI) or Lisala (LIQ), birthplace of the country's kleptocratic despot, Mobutu Sese Seko.

Northward routes reached Europe with two widebody DC-10s, the flagships of the fleet. While its no surprise that the airline connected Kinshasa to Brussels thrice-weekly, it is somewhat more remarkable that a Wednesday morning departure arrived in Athens later in the evening--an uncommon destination from equatorial Africa nowadays.

The above is part of the collection of Björn Larsson, and is reposted under the generous privileges of the fantastic Timetable Images website.

The next post will detail the second portion of Air Zaïre's 1977 timetable.

Sabena landing Kisangani, 1959.

In 1959, this film was shot from aboard an unidentified aircraft of the Sabena fleet as it landed at Stanleyville, now known as Kisangani. Its also not specified whether this plane was flying from Leopoldville, the capital of the soon-to-be independent Congo, or directly from Brussels, or perhaps elsewhere.

Hewa Bora Airways Network, c.2009

Air travel is essential in the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe with fewer than 3,000km of paved roads. Despite this necessity, and although it is estimated to be home to a population larger than Germany, the war-scarred, impoverished nation has very few consumers of air transport. The country has not had a consistent candidate for national carrier since the days of Air Zaïre. In the decade since the switch from Zaïre to the Democratic Republic of Congo, this mantle has been held aloft on the wings of the curiously-named Hewa Bora Airways (Swahili for "Fresh Air").

HBA flies a mixed fleet, mostly MD-82s, across the massive equatorial state, connecting the major cities and economic centers (Lubumbashi of copper, Mbuji Mayi of diamonds, Goma of tantalum) of this well-endowed territory with its sprawling capital, Kinshasa. Kisangani, the city of Stanley Falls, is linked with Goma, capital of the great lakes region in the far east. According to the airline's website, a number of new domestic destinations have come into the fold since this map was drawn, as well as Entebbe.

Hewa Bora also hops from N'Djili airport across the mile-wide Congo River to the neighboring Congolese capital of Brazzaville on the opposite shore. Johannesburg is reached via the Katangan copperbelt conurbation of Lubumbashi.

The map shows a reach to northerly latitudes linking the world's other large francophone capitals, Paris via Brussels-- although there is no record of this occurring, and HBA has long been on EU's list of banned carriers, as are all airlines domiciled in the DRC.