Air Vanuatu Network, 2011

Following the previous post, this later, glossier map of Air Vanuatu shows a smaller airline, with no apparent service to Fiji or the Solomon Islands, but the same network to New Caledonia, New Zealand, and New South Wales. The flight from Espiritu Santo to Brisbane has endured. Auckland is for some reason misplaced at the center of the country.

Air Vanuatu Network, August 2009

The entire expanse of Air Vanuatu's reach, from the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Fiji, as well as New Zealand and the main cities of Australia, the country's main economic patrons. This includes a nonstop from Espiritu Santo Island to Brisbane.

Scheduled Passenger Routes from Hawaii, 1971: West of the Dateline

Examining the left-hand side of the same map from the previous post, a State Department of Transportation map from 1971-2. There are many flights between Hawaii and Australia, connecting nonstop from Honolulu to Brisbane and Sydney, as well as Auckland, while connecting New Caledonia and Fiji along the way and with Melbourne as an onward destination. The  trans-Micronesia service is shown in special green, dipping down to Nauru, with a major west Pacific base at Guam, which connects onward to Manila, Hong Kong, and Taipei. Tokyo and Okinawa are served non-stop.

Its somewhat difficult to discern which routes certain airlines, listed above, served at the time, especially BOAC and VARIG; Pan Am likely served many of these flights.

Aircalin Network, 2011

A much sleeker interface greets the visitor to Aircalin's 2011 website, compared to the grainy réseau of just three years earlier, shown in the previous post. The only major addition to the network is Seoul, suggesting the increasing importance of Asian visitors to the archipelago. Wallis and Futuna are shown as separate nodes, showing a link between the two fellow francophone islands.

Beyond this, the carte includes cooperative networks with (unspecified) Australian and New Zealand carriers to other antipodean cities via Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland, demonstrating how easily Aircalin's network can be reached via these gateways. The new map also shows more distant destinations at its edges: Honolulu, Ho Chi Minh Ville, and Hong Kong; Shanghai and Singapour, Bali and Bangkok, and even Los Angeles, suggesting an expansionary eye toward linking New Caledonia with California, and China.

Aircalin Network, c.2008

Aircalin, the international airline of New Caledonia, France's largest overseas department in the Pacific, stretched from Auckland and Australia to Asia in 2008 in this grainy .jpg sourced from this website.

Japan saw multiweekly A330 flights to Osaka and Tokyo. More regionally Aircalin linked together the other French possessions in the Pacific, from Papeete, Tahiti, in Polynesia, to tiny Wallis et Futuna north of Fiji, as well as nearby Vanuatu (now independent, once an Anglo-French condominium). The major cities of Australia and New Zealand, primary sources of tourists, were also reached.

Air Nauru: Tenth Anniversary Stamps, 1980

The microscopic Republic of Nauru, with its mere few thousand citizens, has had few indigenous subjects for philately, so its little wonder that the national airline was featured at least once. Air Nauru was in its fully glory at aged ten, fueled by phosphate profits and stretching as far away as Auckland, Melbourne, and Hong Kong, but Japan and Honolulu.

Tarawa, Kiribati was just one of at least twenty Pacific islands that the Boeing B727 and B737 jets touched down on, from Guam to Fiji, Okinawa to Rarotonga, Noumea to Niue. Air Nauru was in many cases (such as Tarawa) one of the few, or only, scheduled services to link these far-flung atolls to the outside world.

The airline's fate sank with that of its nation, as Nauru declined from tiny, wealthy island republic to shady haven for tax cheats and Afghan refugees. The airline declined from a fleet of more than five aircraft to a single jet, which was seized by Australian authorities for unpaid taxes in December 2006.

Air Austral Network, 2011

Air Austral, the airline of the Indian Ocean island département of Reunion, operates a network reminiscent of UTA French Airlines of an earlier era, with globe-spanning services touching four continents.

Air Austral connects distant New Caledonia and the francophone Indian Ocean, both Reunion and the recently-referendumed overseas département of Mayotte, as well as the independent nations of Mauritius, the Seychelles, the Comoros, and Madagascar. A web of long spans connect the airport at St. Denis with the six largest cities of the metropole. A new route from Mayotte to Paris is the airline's latest development. The airline also serves Sydney, Bangkok and Johannesburg.

Air Austral may be a small airline, but its ultra-long haul operations have big needs: it is one of the premier customer for an all-economy class Airbus A380. In 2014, it will begin packing the superjumbo full of more than 800 holiday-makers on half-day long flights heading for the resorts of the Equatorial oceans.

UTA French Airlines: Worldwide Network, 1989

Yet another prize of Flickr user caribb's worldwide network of UTA, French Overseas Airlines, at the height of its glory, when the purple and green jumbo jets circled the globe in a Paris-New York-Los Angeles-Papeete-Sydney-Tokyo circumnavigation. UTA held a dozen-odd other stations from San Francisco to Muscat to Colombo to the metropole, quite aside from its huge spread of African destinations. As caribb himself puts it: "for the most part, destinations Air France didn't want...it would have been a good airline to work for as a pilot or FA."

The following posts detail UTA's famously extensive African network.

Timetablist will be dedicating an intermediate period going forward to highlight some of the incredible finds of Flickr user 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.

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.