Farewell to Icelandic PLAY Airlines, 2025

 

A billboard at Keflavík Airport, advertising the route system of ultra-low-cost airline PLAY as it appeared in September 2024. Heavy on continental Europe, with significant overlap of its flag-carrier rival Icelandair to Span and Scandinavia, but with a handful of unique outstations including Athens, Bologna, Lisbon, Liverpool, Porto, and Venice. 

The service to "New York" was actually to Stewart International Airport in Newburgh some 60 miles north of what most people consider the destination "New York" to be; likewise the flight to "Toronto" was actually to John C. Monro Airport in Hamilton, Ontario—not the better known hubs served by Icelandair (both of these smaller airports making their Timetablist debut with this post). The Canadian operation ended in the Spring of 2025 as PLAY liquidated its transatlantic operations. 

Whatever the commercial attempts undertaken to differentiate itself, PLAY went the way of purple predecessor WOW Air and is no longer with us. 

VARIG: Worldwide Network, 1973

The International route network of VARIG Brazilian Airlines in 1973 is a fascinating glimpse into a bygone world of flag carriers. Far more European cities are linked directly or indirectly with Brazil by its main airline than today, an indecipherable tangle of routes connects even tertiary airports such as Geneva and Copenhagen. The network funnels together at Rio de Janeiro, with Sao Paulo a tiny dot in Rio's shadow; today Sao Paulo is by far the dominant gateway into South America. Also note the southern Atlantic routes, particularly to Lagos and Cape Town. Ironic that four decades later this rising economic giant does boast a global carrier with an equal reach on continental Europe or Africa.

See the following post for a detail on the South American section of VARIG's network. 

TACV Network, c.2011

An original design by Airlineroutemaps.com shows the network of Cape Verdean flag carrier, TACV. Few airlines could boast such an impressive size-to-reach ratio, with the tiny company connecting four continents on both sides of the Atlantic. From Praia, the national capital, flights hop to nearby Dakar and Bissau on the mainland; the largest regional hub and the nearby Lusophone capital.

The motherland is well served also, with three flights to the Iberian peninsula in total: to the two busiest Portuguese airports, Lisbon and Porto, as well as Madrid. Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan are all served from Sal, with Munich connected via a stop in Las Palmas.

In the New World, the giant Portuguese-speaking Brazil is linked from the closest large city, Fortaleza, while larger, closer airports in North America are bypassed in favor of Boston, hub of America's largest Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities; New England boasts the largest Cape Verdean population outside of the islands themselves. TACV uses a B757 on the route.

SATA Air Açores Network, 2011.

Aside from SATA Internaçional's impressive charter and scheduled transocean services, shown in the previous post, which stretch from the Pacific to the Baltic, SATA's inter island services extend southward to Madeira, and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, and across each Azore, linking with the principal cities of Portugal proper: Lisbon, of course, but also Faro and Oporto.

SATA Internaçional Network, 2011

As mentioned in the two previous posts on TAP's 1974 network, the contemporary situation off the Straits of Gibraltar finds much of the service between the Azores archipelago and the rest of the world handled by SATA Air Açores/SATA Internaçional, whose two arms wrap impressively from San Francisco Bay to Stockholm. At the center of this world is a magnifying glass enlargement of the Azores themselves, as well as Madeira; exhaustive services between and within the islands themselves-- the center of the map will be detailed in the next post.