AtlasGlobal Destinations, January 2018

A somewhat strange, translucent adverting stand placed in the lower level of the (now closed) Istanbul Ataturk Airport—one of those disappointing, low-ceilinged basements waiting rooms where travelers await the chaotic stampede of board-by-bus to the remote stand. 

As unappealing as the room is, it is not very much improved by plexiglass box obstructing the flow of passengers to the gate. But at least it is adorned with interesting stickers: Bishkek, Lviv, Kharkov, Makhachala, Nizhnekamsk, Tbilisi, Zaporizhia—even an astute geography buff could be stumped. Turkish low-cost, leisure airline AtlasGlobal specialized in regional flights across the Black Sea and Caspian region.

This, it seems, would be the high-point of AtlasGlobal, which always sounded a bit more like an industrial conglomerate than an air carrier. The airline faltered in the year following this photo, temporarily halting all flights, only to attempt a limited relaunch in early 2020 which only lasted until February of this year.

AZALJET Timetable, 2016

This may be one of the only timetables published of AZALJET, the low-cost leisure division of AZAL Azerbaijan Airlines, which was announced in February 2016 but folded in to the mainline operations barely a year later. 

AZALJET focused on two regions: The CIS region, especially Russia, including the critical trunk routes of Moscow (interestingly both Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports) and St. Petersburg, as well as Kiev and Lviv in Ukraine; Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, along with Mineralnye Vody, a city of 75,000 in Stavropol region of the Caucasus Mountains which is the last main town on the rail line between Russia and Baku, and makes its Timetablist debut here. 

The second set of routes connects to other regional cities including Tblisi, Georgia and Tabriz, the northwesternmost Iranian city that is almost more Azerbaijani than Persian. There are also a half-dozen Turkish cities, including the important routes to Ankara and Istanbul as well as Mediterranean leisure destinations such as Antalya, Bodrum, and Dalaman. 

The distinction between the main carrier and this low-cost unit was always quite blurred; there was hardly enough time to distinguish the two before AZALJet was closed down. This is reflected in the fleet listed in the right-most column: most flights are with A319s and A320s but there is the occasional B757 to Bodrum and Antalya, two flights per each weekday is operated with a B767, and even an A340 flies on one of the weekly rotations to Antalya until the end of August. 

AZAL Azerbaijan Airlines Network, mid-2016

Following on the previous post, by staying in the trans-Caspian region: here is the route map of another post-Soviet, Central Asian flag carrier, Azerbaijan Airlines, a rather convoluted web of polychrome routes, four different color markers for barely three dozen destinations including an array of code-shares.

Ignoring the third-party services, there are the main line routes themselves—labeled AZAL, the alternative acronym for the state airline—in a dark purple, an eclectic roster of cities across three continents, including, Barcelona, Berlin, Milan, Minsk and Prague in Europe to Dubai and Tel Aviv in southwestern Asia and distant Beijing in the east, shown in an inset at right. On the left, the pride of the operation, the non-stop Dreamliner flight from Baku to New York-JFK, which was almost axed last year.

In red are the leisure destinations of the short-lived AZALJET division, mostly to Aegean Turkey including Istanbul, Izmir, Bodrum, Dalaman, Antalya and Ankara, as well as Aktau, Kazakhstan, Tblisi, Tehran, Kazan, Lviv and Kiev. This unit only existed for barely a year, from March 2016 to 2017, before being folded back in to the central operations. 

Turkmenistan Airlines: Route Map, c.2016

This rather incredible specimen is featured on the non-official website of Turkmenistan Airlines—or at least one of the most prominent, as there is apparently more than one...which is in a way helpful, as the flag carrier of the Republic of Turkmenistan seems to lack an English language presence on the worldwide web. 

Despite this curious lack of official online connectivity, Turkmenistan Airlines does spread its gloriously evergreen-accented fleet across Asia and Europe, as seen here on this odd warp-grid projection which appears to converge at 0º Lattitude 0º Longitude, cut off at the bottom-left. 

Other than this Dr. Strangelove-sound-studio meets 2004 internet aesthetic, the route network itself is is also a bit skewed, with different cities in larger and smaller typeface at random, "Pekin" Minsk, Moscow and Frankfurt seem important, Amritsar, Donetsk, Istanbul and Lviv somehow less so. This usual airline shows up in a few unexpected places, especially its farthest western reach, "Birminghem," which does not see very much foreign metal, nor does it seem to possess a Central Asian community of any size, yet has apparently captured a segment of the Midlands-to-India market. 

There was a rather severe hiccup when the airline was banned from European Union air space from February to late 2019, which left passengers suddenly stranded, met with an abundance of Turkic bureaucratic indifference with total institutional apathy to get customers home. 

These route maps appear to have preceded that episode, as there is some reporting that the network shifted more recently: Ankara and Kuala Lumpur were intermittently added  while London and the several Ukrainian cities have all been dropped, while the most recent development has been a new service to Jeddah utilizing the carrier's pride-of-fleet B777-200, but this has been delayed under the present circumstances.