Icelandair: Your way to Norway, 2011

Continuing to look at Icelandic air carriers in the 21st century, here is a magazine advert for Icelandair, specifically highlighting the airline's service to four Norwegian airports: Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, and Trondheim. The top of the page lists, in no particular order, Icelandair's 19 other European destinations from Glasgow to Alicante. That number has today nearly doubled above 35 cities, counting a number of seasonal services. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: Europe

Like it's arch-rival Emirates, Qatar Airways blankets Europe with over two-dozen non-stops from Doha, although many of these are with its narrow-body A320 aircraft, the airline also intersperses its A330, B777, and B787 widebodies into these operations. Paris and London also see Qatar's double-decker A380 superjumbos. Qatar serves a number of cities which seldom see intercontinental flights, especially in southeastern Europe and the Balkans: Sarajevo and Skopje in particular. 

Etihad Route Map, September 2016: Europe

Continuing to perhaps unfairly compare Etihad to its larger rival Emirates, the twenty European cities which connect to Abu Dhabi is impressive coverage for most carriers. The range of destinations reveal as much about Etihad's aggressive acquisition strategy over the last decade as the connectivity to the continent. 

Etihad today has stakes in Alitalia (hence Milan and Rome), Air Berlin (hence the flight into Düsseldorf), Air Serbia (how else to explain the flight to Belgrade) and completely rebranded Swiss regional airline Darwin into Etihad regional, which interconnects the center of Europe. 

As interesting as this somewhat incongruous string of purchases is, it begins to make for a very messy map. There are far more blue "partner" flights on this small inset graphic than the single fan of bright red links to Abu Dhabi. Together it makes the route map much too busy and challenging to read: even the black city labels in Central Europe are nearly blotted out. 

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.

Gulf Air: Four Times Weekly to Athens, Relaunched June 2014

Quite unlike the contemporary six-continent dominance of its progeny, Bahrain-based Gulf Air's fortunes have long been on a slow but steady decline. Operations as far-flung as Houston and Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Jakarta, Manchester and Melbourne are all long gone, as the multi-state alliance was pulled apart. 

Today, there are no flights to North America, East Asia or Australia, and its once-comprehensive spread across Europe has been reduced to only London, Paris, Frankfurt, Istanbul and Moscow.

It was somewhat of a victorious move, therefore, to relaunch flights to a new Euro gateway, in this case, the somewhat-unlikely choice of Athens, which, despite the economic contraction that if anything exceeds in magnitude the retreat of Gulf Air itself, at least has the advantage of being within range of Gulf Air's narrow body fleet. 

Air Afrique: Schedule from Abidjan, 1990

The remainder of this Air Afrique Week will be devoted to reposting pages from the airline's timetable from mid-1990, which was originally posted by our friends at the Spanish-language Airline Memorabilia site.

Here is a page of the superhub schedule: flights out of Abidjan's Port Bouet Airport, the airline's busiest operating base. Non-stop flights within the consortium's network include a litany of A-300 flights to nearby Lomé and Niamey and two-stop service to Douala and Libreville, while other flights in West Africa include a single non-stop DC-10 flight to Lagos and Monrovia, once per week, which, although just next door, are as frequent as the DC-10 services to Geneva, Lyon and Marseille. The pride-of-network, twice weekly trans-Atlantic flights to New York-JFK are at right. Milan, Munich, Manchester, Moscow, London and Montreal are also shown, along with other connecting services to as nearby as N'Djamena and as distant as Los Angeles.

Cathay Pacific: System Timetable, Winter 1989-90

It's hard to make out all the various cities in Cathay Pacific's network in the immediate years following the return of Hong Kong to China, but it is interesting to note that a non-stop to Manchester was added to the network for this 1989-90 winter, a route which does not exist today. Port Moresby was added to the route to Auckland, and network stretched into the Indian Ocean with a flight to Mauritius.  A single trans-Pacific service links San Francisco, via Vancouver.

Brussels Airport Departure Board #4

The late afternoon at Brussels Airport is dominated by flights by mainline carriers, many of them run by Brussels Airlines. These are interspersed with two more distant, exotic destinations: Royal Air Maroc to Casablanca and Turkish Airlines to Istanbul.

South African Airways: Re-introduction of Johannesburg-Luanda, 1992

The re-introduction of intra-African services by South African Airways coincided with the gradual dismantling of the apartheid state, which culminated in the county's first democratic elections in 1994 (and would, years after that, see the airline shed its Orange-and-Blue color scheme and Afrikaaner initials). Prior to this, SAA had to skirt around jurisdictions, especially in Africa, which banned the carrier from operating in protest of the racist regime.

While marking the occasion of the return of Luanda, Angola, to the network, the airline's entire route map is displayed on the better part of the envelope. This reveals a cat's cradle strung around West Africa, and fanning out from Cape Verde to a host of European cities, as far inland as Vienna and apparently also including Manchester. Looking east, the airline apparently had to dodge Madagascar, and stop at the Seychelles before reaching southeast Asia, and the Cocos Islands before landing on the Australian continent.

A very similar map is provided two years later and shown on the next post.

Air Mauritius: Worldwide Network, 2010: European Routes Detail

Recently, Air Mauritius had a remarkable eight nonstop flights from the Indian Ocean to Europe, with a reliable banking, manufacturing, and tourist trade keeping its newly-repainted widebody Airbus fleet full. But, according to Wikipedia, Vienna and Zurich have joined Brussels and Manchester as destinations that could not be sustained, leaving six airports non-stop service on the red-trimmed A340s to the Indian Ocean island.

Air Asia X: The Long Haul Network, c.2010-12

Interrupting the relentless mining of Flickr user caribb's trove, as a tangent about Southeast Asian leisure services from the recent post on the vintage Qantas route map revealed the above, somewhat mysterious image. Source here.

What is curious about this item is that Air Asia X neither serves these routes at present, nor does trusty Wikipedia confirm this web of destinations as either present or erstwhile, in its index. Its not entirely clear whether these routes has been announced or planned, or if this is just wishful thinking. Milan and Budapest, Paris, and Christchurch have all been announced or active since 2010, but are not shown here.

Olympic Airways: European Network, 2005-2006

A continuation of the previous post, with more details of the European network.

American Airlines to Europe, 1999

This advert, inside an American timetable, embodies just the sort of timid, dated aesthetic that gives American Airlines its insipid, apprehensive reputation. Aimed squarely at its American customers (for who beyond US shores refers to "England"), the map wilts the page with its drippy, watercolor motif, perhaps meant to suggest the museum-hopping of a European vacation. American could not compete in Stockholm, and has since left. Several years ago it did dawn on American's executives, along with the rest of the corporate suites of the US legacy carriers, that high-margin international passengers were being handed off to foreign carriers at major hubs, while they concentrated on regional jets to Des Moines. It also helps that Southwest hasn't gone international, yet. Hence, American tried Moscow and Delhi, United is off to Bahrain, Lagos, and Accra, and Delta is touching down in every city that any other carrier in the world flies to, from Malabo to Melbourne to Montevideo to Malaga. Whether this is a new era of American aviation, in which hyperglobalization shifts the giants from 737s to Las Vegas and into 787s to Lahore, with less Nashville and more Nairobi, remains to be seen. Its an open question if US Carriers can compete on comfort and service with the Europeans, much less the Asian spas-in-the-sky. Delta seems to have had success on its Africa network, which has cut travel times from the East Coast, bypassing a connection in Paris or Amsterdam.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: Dallas/Fort Worth

DFW: American's headquarters hub and its southern transcontinental supercomplex. An astounding number of domestic non-stops, from a long vertical row down the California coast to a matching column on the eastern seaboard, and an arch spanning the Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Canada. At bottom, a diagonal curve of Mexican cities is shown, with a more random array of subtropical cities below this, including Belize, Panama, Lima, Santiago, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. Both Osaka and Tokyo are connected directly at far left, with four European cities: London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Manchester served non-stop at upper right.

American Airlines Hub Maps, 2002: Chicago O'Hare

Chicago O'Hare serves both as American's upper midland superhub to ferry domestic passengers from one side of the continent to the other, as well as a premium business hub for origin-and-destination traffic: Tokyo is at upper-left; a vertical row of ten European non-stops are at upper-right. Honolulu is at far bottom left, a smattering of Mexican cities is served, but the farthest into the Caribbean basin is the non-stop to the San Juan complex: travelers to Latin America must connect through Dallas or Miami.

Syrianair Network: c. 2005-6

This somewhat over-designed refraction is Syrianair's network route map, c. 2005/6, showing a strong Mid-East and North African network, and plenty of European routes. The black routes come out of Damascus, extending to Manchester and Casablanca, whereas red routes seem to emanate from Aleppo, connecting as far as Stockholm, which, like Paris, is badly out of place. Even with the lazy labeling by three-letter codes, Barcelona is unmarked.

The destinations in the central circle will be detailed in the next post.

VLM Network, 2005/6

Smart little Flemish Airline VLM is not hubbed in Belgium, but rather London's City Airport. The network has shifted a bit in the last few years, with Liverpool and the Isle of Man dropped, and some French Cities added.