Kenya Airways: Africa in Focus, March 2016

This route map showing Kenya Airways's vast operations across Africa can be seen as something of a key to the graphic in the advertisement shown in yesterday's post, although, strangely, Bangui itself has been left off the map. Routes span outward from Nairobi, naturally, although KQ continues to maintain something of a mini-hub in Accra to connect to Freetown and Monrovia, and Bamako is linked in with Dakar. There is likewise a set of interlinking routes in Southern Africa, connecting Lilongwe with Lusaka, Lusaka with Harare, and Harare with Livingston, at Victoria Falls.

Korongo Weekly Flight Schedule, 2013

Switching back to Korongo, whose weekly timetable from last year shows just how small the fledgling airline's operations truly are: only one, at most two, flights per day, with the most frequent operation being a near-daily Lubumbashi-Kinshasa service, which stops in Mbuji-Mayi on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays. Service to Johannesburg is also thrice weekly.

Korongo Promotion: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa and return, 2014

While the Democratic Republic of Congo may have among the lowest internet penetration rates in the world, Korongo Airlines nonetheless proceeds with a web marketing campaign as most of its customers are international mining executives, even in the case of its mainline domestic route between two of DRC's most important cities: the national capital, Kinshasa, and the capital of Katanga province, Lubumbashi. A deal priced in US Dollars.

Korongo Airlines Route Map, 2013-14

Still today, Belgian's primary commercial airline is greatly involved in the aviation market of the Congo. Here is a recent route map of Korongo Airlines, the Congolese subsidiary of Brussels Airlines, which has been featured previously here. 

The airline has slowly been expanding from southeastern Katanga province to the capital Kinshasa, where the dotted line SN flights reach Brussels almost daily. A connection to Johannesburg from Lubumbashi is especially convenient for mining executives; more recent routes now link Mbuji-Mayi and the secondary Katangan city of Kolwezi, one of the most active center for Cobalt mining in the world.

Zambia Airways: Quick Reference Timetable, Winter 1995

 Staying the Eastern and Southern portion of Africa, here is an historic document from nearly twenty years ago, a quick reference timetable for Zambia Airways which expired on 25 March 1995. The cover provides an index to five pages of flight services, divided from and to Lusaka, the little airline's all-important hub. At the top, an international route network shows flights to five southern African capitals: Lilongwe, Gaborone, Johannesburg, Manzini and Harare, as well as a more distant service to Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Two longer flag-ship routes, to Bombay and London, were undoubtedly the pride of the company. Other regional and domestic routes to Lubumbashi, Ndola, Chipata, Mansa, Kasama and Mfuwe are listed inside the timetable but not shown on the map.

Kenya Airways: The Eastern and Southern Africa Routes, 2011.

A detail of the previous post showing the Kenya Airways network stretching across eastern and Southern Africa: non-stops to Gaborone and Johannesburg, and a inter-linked network of services to Lusaka, Lilongwe, Harare and Maputo, whereas Nampula in northern Mozambique is served non-stop. There are also direct flights to Lubumbashi and Ndola in the trans-national copperbelt, and flights stretching into the Indian Ocean to Antananarivo, Moroni and Victoria in the Seychelles. Zanzibar is connected to Mombasa, Bujumbura and Kigali are also linked. Flights northwards include Juba and in the Horn of Africa Addis Ababa and Djibouti.

Ethiopian Airlines: The East African Destinations, Spring 2013

Of the more than four dozen African cities that Ethiopian serves, it is particularly strong in its home region of East Africa.

South African Airways: the African Network, 2013

Troubled, loss-making state carrier South African Airways, whose past has been covered extensively on Timetablist, continues to dominate its home continent as one of the largest African carriers. As shown in this flyer circulated at Munich airport earlier this year, the airline still has success connecting passengers via its antipodean hub at Johannesburg OR Tambo, which remains Africa's busiest airport.

Beyond the southernmost cone, detailed in the next post, SAA serves sixteen cities in Western, Central and Eastern Africa, from Dakar to Dar Es Salaam, including smaller airports such as Brazzaville, Bujumbura, Cotonou and Pointe-Noire. However, the airline by-passes the Sahel and Sahara on its way to its new remaining European gateways.

Air Zimbabwe Schedule, September 2011

An Air Zimbabwe timetable from last year, some 14 years after yesterday's map, shows an airline no longer limited to Southern Africa, but with less service within the region also.

Such important connections as Cape Town, Durban, and Nairobi are gone, although the service to Lusaka now connects to Lubumbashi in the DR Congo. The furtive crossing of the Indian Ocean to Mauritius has now been replaced with a quixotic Asian connection to Beijing via Kuala Lumpur. The prestigious London route has been restored.

While the aircraft livery has been updated and a global reach has been achieved, Air Zimbabwe continues to be plagued with problems, and indeed was grounded in the time between this schedule's printing and now.

Air Zaïre Network, 1981

Given this week's sleek but slender offerings from newly-minted Korongo, its incredible to look back a time when Congolese carriers had a much wider reach: the above poster shows the spread of Air Zaïre at its zenith, when it was "also celebrating 20 years" since its founding in 1961 as Air Congo.

The national carrier had an astonishing array of services, which are here represented by a powerful kinetic gesture reminiscent of an African antelope artwork. The European cities are connected by the arc of the animal's horn: Athens, Rome, Geneva, Frankfurt, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and of course Brussels. 

The second horn aligns with the West African route, linking Kinshasa with Lagos, Libreville, Douala, Lomé, Abidjan, and Dakar. Lubumbashi is the only domestic destination included here but was hardly the only internal operation. 

East Africa on the animal's underside show Lusaka, its southernmost city (South Africa was shunned) but also Kigali, Bujumbura, Nairobi, Entebbe and Dar Es Salaam.

This calligraphic creature was used for a number of years, appearing on timetables and other advertisements. Air Zaïre's fortunes would sink with the rest of the continent's aviation companies, and indeed with country itself, which continues to be mired in conditions far less promising than a quarter century ago. 

Korongo Airlines: Kinshasa-Lubumbashi, 2012

A web advert for the young Korongo Airlines, offering its 8 weekly flights to Lubumbashi from Kinshasa at also mentioning its twice-weekly flights to Johannesburg. The resemblance to its parent, Brussels Airlines, is apparent in the color scheme.

Korongo Airlines Network, 2012

A new chapter in the saga of Congolese Aviation is the recent arrival of Korongo Airlines. Backed by Belgians (as has so frequently been the case in the history of Congo's airlines), Korongo has been constituted by Brussels Airlines with other partners. According to the map, the airline seems to only offer a flight between Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, although the route map, taken from the airline's website, also includes diamond hub Mbuji-Mayi, secondary Katangan capital of Kolwezi. Beyond the vast extent of the Congo itself, prestigious plans are apparently in place for flights to Johannesburg (already underway according to the Wikipedia article) and Brussels-- the dashed line from Kinshasa suggests that for the time being passengers may connect with SN service to Zaventem.

Zambezi Airlines Routes, 2011

Zambezi Airlines has had a short, rocky history, having commenced flights in 2008 just before the demise of Zambian Airways. But its certificate to operate was suspended by authorities from 2011 until just last month. The airline is now resurrecting its regional network of scheduled services, currently only operating from Lusaka to Johannesburg but surely hoping to return to its pre-crisis network, which as can be seen above stretched from the DR Congo to Dar Es Salaam to Cape Town.

With the continued growth of the Zambian economy and boom in its cooper belt, along with its positive democratic developments, the young airline has the opportunity to land its reticulated tail fin at other airports across the region, giving the rising nation a de-facto flag carrier and a regional player.

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.

Zambian Airways: Domestic and Regional Routes, c.2008

Via this website, showing the full-extent of the now-defunct Zambian Airways, around the height of its operation in perhaps 2008. Regional operations, apparently with two decrepit B737-200s, reached as far as Harare, Lilongwe, and Lubumbashi from Lusaka, and operated a second base at the center of the copperbelt, Ndola.

This airline is unrelated to the much older, larger, but equally moribund Zambia Airways, which used to stretch from New York to Bombay, with dozens of destinations in between.

Although descendant of an aviation enterprise stretching back to 1948, the formally-named Zambian Airway's reach and lifetime was much more limited. Having come in to the national name in 1998, in the wake of Zambia Airway's 1994 collapse, Zambian Airways itself suspended service in January 2009, which led to the government filing suit against the airline the following month. Zambia today is without a state carrier, although the privately-held Zambezi Airways reportedly covers southern Africa from Lusaka.

Air Zimbabwe: The Worldwide Network, c.2006

Via the Travel House UK website comes this undated, computer-generated artifact. Only Africa is shown (and its unclear why the map of Zimbabwe is repeated at left), with red arrows angling out to destinations in Asia and the UK.

Of uncertain vitage, it can be at least cross-referenced with the Timetable Image's archive of the March-October 2006 AirZim schedule, which included once-weekly Dubai-Lubumbashi-Harare and Harare-Singapore-Beijing jaunts (using the same ageing B767 that also reached Gatwick). The B737 reached as far as Mauritius. All but Beijing and London are today erstwhile, as Air Zimbabwe continues to suffer, its zigzag-striped Boeings as pariah as the regime that owns it.

The latest news out this month is a bizarre report that the strike-ridden, cash-strapped, trade-embargoed airline will be acquiring new Airbus jets. This just weeks after pilots refused to operate the current, ancient fleet until they were paid back wages, and amid talk of a need for either a government bailout, privatization, or liquidation.

Ethiopian Airlines: The Eastern & Southern African Routes, 2011

Ethiopian Airlines has long been the premier carrier of the African continent. Prior to the establishment of many state carriers (or even the independence of some African nations), the wings of the Lion of Judah was lauded for its technical proficiency and service.

The airline has not let time, and the development of other formidable African airlines (especially neighboring Kenya Airways), diminish its presence of the continent or its standing as a global carrier. Many African countries lack a home airline or flag carrier, and in the rapid consolidation of airlines around global alliances, it is the largest operations that seem destined to retain their identities. Ethiopian is unquestionably well-positioned as a regional, continental, and global airline.

Over the next four posts, Timetablist will detail Ethiopian Airlines current planet-wide network, which reaches four continents, including an impressive presence in Europe and growing service to China.

In this first post, the headquarters hub at Addis Ababa's Bole Airport pulls in passengers from across Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa.

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.

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.