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.

Congo par Sabena, 1954

A domestic route map of sixty years ago looks much more impressive than the meagre network of Korongo today. Sabena offered services to no less than thirty airports in the vast Belgian colony, with what looks to be busy stations not only at the capital Leopoldville, and the principal regional administrative outposts at Elizabethville and Stanleyville, but throughout the interior of the enormous territory.

There were more than half a dozen routes via various way stations to the metropole in Brussels, including Tripoli, Casablanca, and Rome; all the routes from the capital connected at Kano, which must have been quite an operation in its own right.

In addition, regional African routes spanned the territorial border in all directions: from Leopoldville to Portuguese Luanda and Johannesburg, which also had a link to Elizabethville; from Albertville to Dar Es Salaam, from Libenge to Bangui, in French Equatorial Africa. Not especially the route to Entebbe and Nairobi, especially how Kigali lies within the realm of Belgian Central Africa at this time.

South African Airways: African International Network, 2013

As detailed in the previous post, the inflight magazine for South African Airways lists the airline's network across Africa, showing flights to Dar Es Salaam, Nairobi, Mauritius, Blantyre, Lilongwe, Entebbe, Maputo, Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, Bujumbura, Kigali, and Libreville, exclusively with narrow-body A319 and B737-800 aircraft, except for the route to nearby Mauritius which uses the quad-engined wide body A340. Long-haul routes to four other continents, shown on the bottom half of the page, are detailed in the following post.

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.

Ethiopian: Three times weekly from Addis Ababa to Ndola, April 2013

Ethiopian's neck-and-neck race against Kenya Airways to cover all of Africa has spread to a second airport in Zambia: the northern town of Ndola, gateway to Zambia's famed copperbelt region. Ethiopian serves the town non-stop from Addis Ababa's Bole Airport three times per week.

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.

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.

British Caledonian: The Intercontinental Routes, 1977

Reprinted with kind permission from the wonderful Airline Memorabilia blog is the inside jacket cover of a British Caledonian timetable, showing the airline's intercontinental services at the height of the airline's reach.

A dozen routes shower out from London (Gatwick) to South America and Africa, with service across the Canary Islands and North Africa.

In West Africa, Dakar, Banjul, Freetown and Monrovia (previously posted on Timetablist) are interwoven, with the cooperative operations of Sierra Leone Airways from Gatwick to Robertsfield via Lungi also shown. Accra, Lagos and Kano form another subgroup.

Central and Southern Africa are only sparsely served in a triangulated service linking Kinshasa and Lusaka, with a connecting service to the Zambian copperbelt capital of Ndola. Presumably, British Airways had rights that dominated East and Southern Africa, from Kenya to yet-to-be independent Rhodesia.

The next post will cover the South American services of the same map. Thanks again to Airline Memorabilia for the privileges.