Farewell to Icelandic PLAY Airlines, 2025

 

A billboard at Keflavík Airport, advertising the route system of ultra-low-cost airline PLAY as it appeared in September 2024. Heavy on continental Europe, with significant overlap of its flag-carrier rival Icelandair to Span and Scandinavia, but with a handful of unique outstations including Athens, Bologna, Lisbon, Liverpool, Porto, and Venice. 

The service to "New York" was actually to Stewart International Airport in Newburgh some 60 miles north of what most people consider the destination "New York" to be; likewise the flight to "Toronto" was actually to John C. Monro Airport in Hamilton, Ontario—not the better known hubs served by Icelandair (both of these smaller airports making their Timetablist debut with this post). The Canadian operation ended in the Spring of 2025 as PLAY liquidated its transatlantic operations. 

Whatever the commercial attempts undertaken to differentiate itself, PLAY went the way of purple predecessor WOW Air and is no longer with us. 

VARIG: The Transatlantic Routes, c.1970

 

Remaining as Lusophone as our last post, here is a snippet of a folded, full-color map with the red routes of the storied Brazilian airline VARIG spanning across, sometime about half a century ago. In the analog era it was rather common for airlines to display their networks on commercially-available cartography rather than commissioning a custom graphic. 

This diagram demonstrates a now-bygone era when Rio de Janeiro's Galeão Airport was the country's primary intercontinental gateway, before it was eclipsed in the mid-1980s by São Paulo's new Guarulhos International.

What can be made out from this odd clipping are a web of long lines connecting Brazil to Europe, presumably several cities in Portugal besides just Lisbon, one of which apparent stops in Sal in the Cape Verde Islands (see previous post). 

A more unusual routing links the West African coast at Monrovia-Robertsfield, before continuing straight northward for what may be Lisbon or even Madrid. This way station existed for many years, the nadir of which was the tragic 1967 crash of VARIG Flight 837, a DC-8 on a Beirut-Rome-Monrovia-Recife-Rio routing. 

Once the links are received in Rio, a busy web of regional routes fans back out towards Buenos Aires, Porto Alegre, and Asunción. São Paulo seems a but a minor pit stop on the way to other places. A somewhat thinner red marking traces the vast Brazilian coast, linking Rio with Salvador, Recipe, Natal, and Belem, while an interior hop reaches the new capital, Brasilia. 

Athens Departure Board, 19 August 2017 (1)

 Two hours of mid-morning departures at Athens during what is by far the busiest time of year: the mid-August tourist rush. This block of flights are split between European connections: Geneva on Swiss, Istanbul on Turkish, Schönefeld and Orly on Easyjet—with a contingent of the airport's constant bank of domestic flights. 

The storied Olympic name is still in use—a brand bought out of bankruptcy and now operating as only a prop-plane domestic carrier—with flights to Heraklion, Santorini, Kalamata in southwestern Peleponnese, and a squadron of Cycladic flights all departing at 10:40 to spread to Naxos, Paros, Mykonos and the Ionian isle of Zakynthos. 

Olympic is not alone in the Greek domestic airspace: smaller private upstart Ellinair links to the northern secondary city of Thessaloniki, where is has its home base. Romanian low-cost airline Blue Air flies to the world's only other Greek-speaking state, Cyprus, and its main airport at Larnaca. There is a second flight to Larnaca at 10:35, showing a codeshare with Air Canada. This is on Aegean, which is today the de facto Greek flag carrier and parent company to Olympic. The extent of Aegean's pan-European reach is indicated by the less-common destinations on the board: Dubrovnik and Lisbon. 

KLM: The African Routes, 1955

In looking back at the once-prominent role of Kano in trans-Saharan aviation, here we look back at the pre-jet age, when KLM stretched just a few routes across the vast African continent. In this detail from the airline's route map in about 1955, the Amsterdam—Rome—Kano—Brazzaville—Johannesburg spine stretches down the center, a line which was featured far back in the early days of The Timetablist. 

In the east, a bundle of routes pin at Cairo, with a single line appearing to run down to Khartoum. On the left side of the map, red lines bunch at Lisbon, where two split off, one seeming to stop at Sal in Cape Verde before heading to the northern coast of Brazil, while a second hugs the mainland, changing course slightly at Dakar, likely for Rio de Janeiro.

CEIBA Intercontinental Routes, November 2015

Little Equatorial Guinea has not one but two airlines; the privately-formed Cronos, detailed in the previous posts, and the state carrier, CEIBA Intercontinental, which mimics its sister with a series of regional routes, including Accra, Lomé, and Douala, but interestingly, according to this map, avoiding Yaoundé and Lagos. The airline also extends further, reaching Abidjan and Dakar, as well as Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo. 

 Undoubtedly the pride of CEIBA's services is the long-haul to Madrid. The sole long-haul operation flying the Equatoguinean flag reaches Barajas in the erstwhile colonial metropole thrice-weekly. As a carrier still banned by the European Union, with a B777 operated by Portuguese aviation company White Airways, complete with a 3-class configuration.

The other proximas routes shown here: Casablanca, Johannesburg, Las Palmas, Lisbon and Luanda, have never come to pass. 

Emirates Route Map, August 2016: Europe

A thick baobab trunk of routes juts up from Mesopotamia, spreading its boughs across the European continent. With a staggering 37 European destinations, Emirates has blanketed the region with flights even more so than any other portion of the globe, from Moscow to Manchester, Milan to Malta, Madrid to Munich. The depth of its reach is shown in secondary and tertiary markets: Prague, Budapest, Geneva, Lyon, Nice, Oslo, Glasgow, Bologna, and Hamburg are just a handful of third-tier cities which see a wide-body Emirates plane land daily, non-stop from Dubai.

SAS: The Worldwide Routes, 1960

In looking at the 21st century SAS, we can compare yesterday's subject to same airline at the height of its global reach. 

One the more regal route maps to ever grace the Timetablist, this magnificent, dynamic cartography exemplifies an earlier era the grandeur of the jet age is reflected in the eloquence of this graphic design. A so-called “spiral-polar projection,” which was “created especially for Scandinavian Airlines System to illustrate its worldwide routes,” are the only notations to the map. 

A quad-jet whisks its way into the high atmosphere, the might of its propulsion sweeps up the landmasses themselves, with far Siberia pulled away from the surface of the planet. The very latitudes of the global are twisted into the vortex of the jetliner's contrail. 

Upon the surface of these landmasses, thick red lines spread outward from Northern Europe to five continents. At the outer limits of the first generation jetliner's range, an impressive Oslo—Los Angeles was achieved, and lasted for decades, which as mentioned yesterday only came back in March 2016. Montreal and New York (the latter via Glasgow, it seems) were the only other North American destinations.

South America was, somewhat incredibly, more thoroughly covered, with the system's Lisbon—Recife—Rio de Janeiro—Sao Paulo—Montevideo—Buenos Aires—Santiago service. Africa was also served with a classic east African spine, Rome—Athens—Cairo—Khartoum—Nairobi—Johannesburg. None of these South American or African cities are served today. 

In addition to a half-dozen Near Eastern cities, SAS operated a trans-Asian trunk route to rival those of other European aviation pioneers, with a scissors-base at Karachi linking to Calcutta—Rangoon—Bangkok, which split to either Jakarta or onward to Manila—Tokyo, which swung northward to Anchorage to return to Copenhagen, here transgressing the print's nautilus-shell projection of the globe. 

Image via the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

ČSA Czeckoslovak Airlines Route Map, 1975: Detail of European Routes

A bit more detail on this Czechoslovak Airlines pinwheel from sometime around 1975. Looking at the inner circle, we see Prague connected to a number of European cities of both east and west, from Bucharest to Brussels to Barcelona. Tunis and Malta are looped together (as Emirates does today) and Algiers is shown as a southwestern outliner. 

See the previous post for an overview, and details of the long-haul routes. The next post will also show some detail of the upper-right side of the cartogram.

Sabena Network: c.1955

Post-war, pre-jet age Sabena still had an impressive reach, with a dense network in Europe spinning out from the low countries northward to Oslo and Stockholm and east to Prague and Vienna. A single westward push stopped at Shannon before destinations unspecified in North America.

Southward, planes reached the Mediterranean at Nice, and stretched further down to Lisbon where a vague connection to South America is suggested. More articulated is the operation at Rome, with planes splitting off for North Africa,  the first crossing the Sahara to stop at Kano before finally reaching the vast Belgian Congo at Leopoldville. A non-stop from Brussels reached into the upper reaches of the Congo to terminate at Elisabethville and Stanleyville, and a single lined continued all the way down to Johannesburg.

In the east, flights criss-crossed at Athens, only reaching Tel Aviv in the Near East, with another flight to Cairo, which turned down to also reach the eastern cities of the colony.

Flight Connections from São Tomé & Príncipe, c.2009

A lost fragment of the internet, this orphan gif, a visual explanation of flight connections to tiny São Tomé & Príncipe, on not-particularly-recent vintage.

The microscopic archipelago is hardly a hub of anything, other than delicious and rare cocoa, but on this map it is the crossroads of the center of the map, the closest republic to where the prime meridian meets the equator. Or, at least, the Lusophone eastern hemisphere.

Luanda and Lisbon are linked, the former via TAAG Angolan Airlines, which still to this day continues on to Sal de Cabo Verde, the latter via TAP (of course) but something else called STP Airways, the acronym denoting the little-known state carrier. Lagos and Libreville are also looped in, the first via Ceiba, the Equatoguinean state carrier, the latter via something simply labelled 'air service.' How perfectly vague.

Douala in nearby Cameroon is served by SCD, an unknown acronym, which may be related to African Connection Airways, which apparently provides air service on the island which may, or may not, include Malabo, Port Harcourt, Brazzaville, Port-Gentil, Pointe-Noire and even Bangui, if its own map is to be believed. TAP is apparently re-routing its services as of July 1st via Accra.

Alitalia: Worldwide service from Cairo, c.1960

A handsome vintage print ad from a cargo trade publication in Egypt from around 1960. On the corner of the shipping news, Alitalia boasts (in French of all tongues) of its sleek jet fleet, with four departures per week from Cairo to Rome aboard the state-of-the-art Caravelle VI, which passengers can also enjoy on regional connections to Beirut, Benghazi, Athens, Frankfurt, Paris, Zürich, Madrid, Tripoli, and more distant Tehran.

But most proudly, Alitalia offers ultramodern quad-jet intercontinental services across the globe: the Super DC-8 flagship shrinks the planet with services to Dakar, Karachi and Caracas, Nairobi, Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, New York and even Sydney.

Prospective passengers could visit the Alitalia offices at the Nile Hilton Hotel, or in Alexandria.

BOAC: The Speedbird Routes Across the World, c.1950

The might of the empire spans the newsprint continents in this vintage route map of BOAC. Trunks routes out of London connect five continents, with a major trunk route crossing the Mediterranean at Malta, heading east to Cairo, Basra, Bahrain and Karachi, where the routes splits north along a Delhi-Calcutta-Rangoon-Bangkok axis, turning northeast to terminate at Hong Kong, while a second route reaches far southeast to Singapore, stopping intermittently at Surabaya, somewhat surprisingly, then into Antipodea at Darwin, finally reaching Sydney, where Tasman Empire Airways connects to Auckland. 

The next post will detail the African and North Atlantic routes. 

CP Air: Worldwide Network, c.1983

The wonderfully random route network of Canadian Pacific Airlines in its classic CP Air age, when it was the airborne division of Canada's premier transport companies but not able to fly it's premier international routes. A unique collection of flights fan out to four other continents, two across the Pacific: Vancouver—Tokyo—Hong Kong and Vancouver—Honolulu—Nadi—Sydney, and one venturing south to the cone of Latin America: Mexico City—Lima—Santiago—Buenos Aires.

From the Alberta prairie, a transpolar route links Edmonton to Amsterdam, linking to a Rome—Athens route. A second trans-Atlantic flight from Montreal lands at Amsterdam, while a third European route also starts in Montreal, but leaps southward to Santa Maria in the Azores, then to Lisbon, Madrid, and connecting again at Rome. Paris and London are absent.

VARIG: Worldwide Network, 1973

The International route network of VARIG Brazilian Airlines in 1973 is a fascinating glimpse into a bygone world of flag carriers. Far more European cities are linked directly or indirectly with Brazil by its main airline than today, an indecipherable tangle of routes connects even tertiary airports such as Geneva and Copenhagen. The network funnels together at Rio de Janeiro, with Sao Paulo a tiny dot in Rio's shadow; today Sao Paulo is by far the dominant gateway into South America. Also note the southern Atlantic routes, particularly to Lagos and Cape Town. Ironic that four decades later this rising economic giant does boast a global carrier with an equal reach on continental Europe or Africa.

See the following post for a detail on the South American section of VARIG's network. 

TACV Network, c.2011

An original design by Airlineroutemaps.com shows the network of Cape Verdean flag carrier, TACV. Few airlines could boast such an impressive size-to-reach ratio, with the tiny company connecting four continents on both sides of the Atlantic. From Praia, the national capital, flights hop to nearby Dakar and Bissau on the mainland; the largest regional hub and the nearby Lusophone capital.

The motherland is well served also, with three flights to the Iberian peninsula in total: to the two busiest Portuguese airports, Lisbon and Porto, as well as Madrid. Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan are all served from Sal, with Munich connected via a stop in Las Palmas.

In the New World, the giant Portuguese-speaking Brazil is linked from the closest large city, Fortaleza, while larger, closer airports in North America are bypassed in favor of Boston, hub of America's largest Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities; New England boasts the largest Cape Verdean population outside of the islands themselves. TACV uses a B757 on the route.

CP Air: Worldwide Routes, October 1978

The incredibly complex connectivity of the classic Canadian Pacific Air Lines route network in October 1978 is shown here in this blazoning vintage advert. Then operating as CP Air, the aviation arm of the Canadian conglomerate offered passenger services to 14 international airports on five continents from no less than five separate gateways across Canada.

Particularly key was the European gateway of Amsterdam, which lined to four Canadian cities: Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto, although somewhat oddly not its primary airport, Vancouver. CP Air jets also departed Toronto for Milan, and Rome, with onward service to Athens from both Rome and Amsterdam. Rome and Lisbon, but not Amsterdam, were served from Montreal, which also enjoyed service to Mexico City. Toronto was also linked to Mexico City as well as Acapulco and Lima. Whether the continuing service from Lima to Santiago, finally terminating at Buenos Aires, were originally from Toronto or Vancouver is unclear.

CP Air also connected all its international gateways, except Montreal, to Honolulu, from whence it plunged far south to Antipodea. CP Air's Pacific operations, shown above, will be detailed in the following post.

Linhas Aereas de Moçambique Routes, 2012

The well-tended website of Mozambique's state carrier, Linhas Aereas de Moçambique, features a handsomely spare route map. Although the online image shows the entire globe, LAM's routes are almost entirely confined to southern Africa as shown here. It is therefore curious that Asia and the Americas are included, as LAM serves neither and in fact only recently was able to re-enter the ex-African market with its return to Lisbon this year. There is a strong emphasis on not only other continents but connecting carriers' services, which quite strangely are shown in solid lines on the map, while the airline's own network is only depicted in faint dotted lines: the effect is to blur distinctions and make LAM's own operations diminished.

While the scope of LAM's presence is small, it impressively flies internationally from what appears to be no less than eight of its ten domestic airports: flies to Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam come out of northeastern Nampula and Pemba, whereas Joanesburgo is served from five cities. There is also a nonstop from Maputo to Cape Town. Somewhat strangely, it appears that the flight to Luanda originates from Inhambane, and the flight to Lisbon on LAM's own wings appears to stop in Beira-- perhaps these are cartographic errors?

Linhas Aereas de Moçambique: Maputo-Lisbon-Berlinin, 1983

Staying in southern Africa: Timetablist has featured a very similar envelope in the past, recognizing Linhas Aereas de Moçambique's service 1983 to Berlin from Maputo, via Lisbon. However, this particular item seems to be principally introducing not just the route but also the aircraft, the Primeiro Voo of a DC-10, which here roars to a landing, facing the viewer straight on. The cancellation stamp is impressed twice, featuring LAM's handsome spread-wing songbird logo. Note also the Fokker friendship in the colors of LAM's ancestor, DETA, on the postage stamp.

LAM has survived to the present day but is shamefully not currently serving Europe, due to the European Union's categorization that no carriers certified by Mozambique's aviation regulatory bodies may enter European airspace. However, given Mozambique's booming economy, demand for intercontinental airline seats is surely rising, and perhaps LAM's fortunes will rise with it.

Ethiopian Airlines Network, c.1960

Appearing almost like the fuzzy felt of a drinks coaster, this map of Ethiopian Airlines mid-century network is a warm and wonderful scene, showing the African continent between a green and red band, like the imperial flag of Ethiopia itself, with the lion of Judah in the southern Atlantic at the lower left of the graphic.

A main North-South route runs between Nairobi and Cairo. A lateral route links Monrovia via Accra and Lagos. Presumably, the two lines angling down the cone of Southern Africa terminate at Johannesburg, but this is not specified, and neither is the significance of the thin lines versus the thick red bolts, which quite curiously cross not at Addis Ababa but at Khartoum. The Monrovia-Conakry-Dakar portion is also a striped hash line, perhaps suggesting that this trunk was not underway but was a future intention. Timbuktu is shown but seemingly not part of the network.

Above the Mediterranean, a rather random assortment of gateways are served: Lisbon, Athens, Frankfurt and Beirut. Aden is linked to Asmara, with promises of more of Asia off to the right of the map. A tiny arrow of the coast of Cap Vert suggests trans-Atlantic connections to the Americas.

Ukraine International Airlines Network: Detail of Western Europe

A continuation from the previous post, showing Ukraine International's many western European destinations, including such small airports as Lisbon, Nice, and Bologna. Ukraine International connects from Kiev but also Odessa, Lvov, Donetsk, and Simferopol.