Qantas Empire Airways Routes, 1930s

A pre-war route map of the Royal Airmail Carrier, Qantas Empire Airways, Ltd. A somewhat-complex array of route indications, for both the company's own air routes as well as that of other air companies, shows the system stretching to four continents, with the Americas absent. The trans-Indian route to Johannesburg connects with an Imperial spine across Rhodesia, East Africa and the Sudan to Cairo, from where the network merges with routes via India, then crossing Europe to terminate at London.

Closer to home, two northern lines, one touching Hong Kong, the other Manila, bank across the Orient to end at Tokyo. At far right, a web of island-hoppers fan out from Sydney to New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Fiji, with lines of a different marking running across the Tasman Sea between Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand.

Qantas: Worldwide Network, March 1973

Yet another goldmine from the lustrous vein of Flickr user caribb's collection, the next three posts will examine the fold-out global route map of Qantas from its timetable issued 4 March 1973.

Qantas was quite a different operation in these days of the early jet age: aside from a dense weave of antipodean services between Australia and New Zealand, and a web of southeast Asian services, the Australian carrier branched around the globe, with a number of rather curious waystations which aren't on its network today in the Middle East and Europe. These will be examined in more detail in the following two posts.

But surely what is most unusual in the entire system is its secondary round-the-world link: the Australian airline's famous "Fiesta Route." A completely unique routing which began in 1966 with the first of the airline's 747s, spanned the South Pacific at Fiji and Tahiti, then crossed the  rest of the ocean and the equator to reach Acapulco, Mexico, hopping on to Mexico City, the wingéd Kangaroo continued eastward to the British colonies at Nassau and then Bermuda, and transversing the Atlantic to finish at London.

The next two posts will examine this item in more detail.

Timetablist will be dedicating an intermediate period going forward to highlight some of the incredible finds of caribb's collection. Timetablist would like to thank caribb (Doug from Montreal) for generously allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons license terms.

Air New Zealand: Pacific System, c. 1972

Air New Zealand was decades away from boasting of a world-leading premium cabin as it is today, but can still pride itself in serving the South Pacific better than nearly any carrier, linking Los Angeles and Honolulu to Fiji and Auckland, and offering a non-stop Tahiti service from LAX, too. Today, Air New Zealand links Los Angeles to London Heathrow as well.