VARIG: The Transatlantic Routes, c.1970

 

Remaining as Lusophone as our last post, here is a snippet of a folded, full-color map with the red routes of the storied Brazilian airline VARIG spanning across, sometime about half a century ago. In the analog era it was rather common for airlines to display their networks on commercially-available cartography rather than commissioning a custom graphic. 

This diagram demonstrates a now-bygone era when Rio de Janeiro's Galeão Airport was the country's primary intercontinental gateway, before it was eclipsed in the mid-1980s by São Paulo's new Guarulhos International.

What can be made out from this odd clipping are a web of long lines connecting Brazil to Europe, presumably several cities in Portugal besides just Lisbon, one of which apparent stops in Sal in the Cape Verde Islands (see previous post). 

A more unusual routing links the West African coast at Monrovia-Robertsfield, before continuing straight northward for what may be Lisbon or even Madrid. This way station existed for many years, the nadir of which was the tragic 1967 crash of VARIG Flight 837, a DC-8 on a Beirut-Rome-Monrovia-Recife-Rio routing. 

Once the links are received in Rio, a busy web of regional routes fans back out towards Buenos Aires, Porto Alegre, and Asunción. São Paulo seems a but a minor pit stop on the way to other places. A somewhat thinner red marking traces the vast Brazilian coast, linking Rio with Salvador, Recipe, Natal, and Belem, while an interior hop reaches the new capital, Brasilia. 

TACV: Fly Non-Stop from Providence to Cabo Verde, 2015

It is a little-known fact that the tiny State of Rhode Island, and much of the surrounding Southern New England region, particularly southeastern Massachusetts, is home to a large diaspora of Cape Verdeans. In fact, the concentration of emigrants is so significant that Cabo Verdean politicians visit the area to campaign in major elections; their presence, along with sizable communities of Brazilians, Azoreans, and those of Portuguese descent, is one of the only regions of the United States in which Portuguese is the most predominant language after English and Spanish.

The Cape Verde connection has been physically manifest during many recent periods by the arrival of one of more unusual airlines to cross the Atlantic: TACV (Transportes Aereos  de Cabo Verde), which announced with great fanfare in February 2015 that it would begin serving T.F. Green State Airport just south of Providence in the summer of that year, with twice and thrice-weekly B757 service its home Lusaphone archipelago off the coast of Africa—the only destination in North America served by the airline. 

The airline had previously served the region's predominant international airport, Boston Logan, but experimented with the switch to the smaller Rhode Island airport, connecting it with the country's capital, Praia. The airport authority advertised the steal with this brochure. 

The link was evidently not successful, as TACV moved back to Boston in the following years, up until it ceased flying altogether during COVID, downstream of a disastrous partnership with Loftlei∂ir, parent company of Icelandair, who took a major stake in 2019, just before world aviation all but shut down, but unwound the investment acerbically in 2021.

Since that crisis, TACV has been all but absent from the skies. It only relaunched limited domestic operations in 2022, and resumed service to Lisbon in 2023 with a sleek new B737 Max. However, it has yet to announce any return to the New England area. 

 

Senegal Airlines Route Network, 2015

The Timetablist celebrated the launch of Senegal Airlines in 2011, as it replaced the defunct Air Senegal and promised a bright future: well capitalized, with a new fleet, able to take advantage of Dakar's natural position at the far-western tip of the African continent.

Sadly, despite Senegal's continued stability and even growth, the airline lasted barely five years. This graphic, an unhelpfully small file size, is one of the few scraps of the airline's history that remains online. It shows the extent of the airline's ambition, although it is challenging to confirm what was realized: was there ever a secondary hub in Cotonou? Here is evidence that at least the Cotonou—Libreville operation existed. Was either Paris or Brussels ever served? Seems, definitely, no.

Gambia Airways Timetable, July 1991

Staying with the previous post in the Gambian capital of Banjul, a rare artifact featured on the excellent, encyclopedic Airline Memorabilia website, this tidbit of West African aviation history: the seven-city weekly flight schedule of all-too-brief Gambia Airways, effective July 1991.

The type-written table shows a six-day per week connection to neighboring Dakar, which reaches further as the week swells, hopping to Praia in the Cabo Verde Islands on Thursday, and culminating in a hectic Friday, with the morning flight heading southward to tiny Bissau, and the returning service passing through Banjul and stretching to the network's northernmost extent at Nouakchott in the afternoon.

Saturday afternoon is also busy, with a southeasterly service to Conakry and Freetown. Sunday sees the airline return to Nouakchott, perhaps a somewhat curious choice for the only city besides Dakar to be served more than once per week.

The schedule was apparently not commercially successful, as Gambia Airways was extremely short-lived, the last picture of one of its Japanese turboprops dates from October 1994, and very little other information exists on the internet.

Special thanks to Airline Memorabilia for this featured item. 

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.

TACV Cabo Verde Airlines Timetable, November 2011

It doesn't get much simpler than an Excel Spreadsheet to publish a timetable. The above Flugplan is currently still available on TACV (Transportes Aéreos de Cabo Verde)'s German-language website, which is targeted toward Teutonic tourists out of Frankfurt.

Despite its diminutive size, TACV is a quad-continental carrier, with additional European flights to Lisbon, Paris and Amsterdam, and the Wikipedia list of destinations, updated at the same time as this schedule, also lists Nice, secondary cities in Portugal, and several cities in Spain and Italy. A single transatlantic 757 service from Praia to Boston Logan is shown above, bridges the island to the world's largest Cape Verdean community, centered around southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Closer to the islands themselves, TACV provides one of the few scheduled services to Lusophone Guinea-Bissau, linking the tiny capital Bissau with Dakar, and also serving Freetown and Banjul on the mainland--although interestingly the African schedule is not included in the above matrix. Lastly, a single link to South America's massive Portuguese-speaking population is achieved by landing at the closest Brazilian city, Fortaleza.

TAAG Angolan Airlines: The International Network, 2011

Last week's post of TAP Air Portugal's African routes leads naturally to the flag carriers elsewhere in Lusophone Africa. Fast-growing TAAG Angolan Airlines has rebounded in the past decade, first from the aftermath of the country's long civil war, and secondly from a two-year European Union ban, which blacklisted the airline from European airspace from 2007 to 2009.

Today, TAAG boasts an all-new fleet flying to five continents, including service to Portuguese-speaking Brazil and Cape Verde, and its old ally Cuba (how long this route will be worthwhile is another question), as well as five cities in Europe and an Asian route stretching to Dubai and Beijing (which alternates with Hainan Airlines's identical routing).

The following posts will show TAAG's continental and domestic networks in more detail.

TAP Air Portugal: The African Routes, Spring 2011

A post last week about the launch of Senegal Airlines was the first time that the city of Bissau had been featured on Timetablist. Here continues the profiling of Portuguese connections to Africa, with a portion of TAP Air Portugal's online map, showing its services to the continent.

Routes fan out from Lisbon to the capitals of former colonies: Bissau, Luanda, Maputo, and tiny Sao Tome, as well as non-Lusophone cities: Dakar at one end, Johannesburg at another, and Cairo on the far right corner. All are apparently served non-stop. At left, the many TAP routes from Lisbon and Porto to Brazil soar past Cap Vert toward South America.

Turkish Airlines: Istanbul-Dakar-Sao Paulo, July 2009

This is a new format for Timetablist: a cellphone camera shot of the departures board of Yoff International Airport in Dakar, Senegal (taken at the ungodly hour of 2:52am! Why are West African flights all in the middle of the night? Really, would someone please leave a comment explaining this...)

This particular screen shows several recent developments, among them Dakar's importance in its flights to the US, Delta's presence in Africa, but Timetablist's favorite route in the world right now has to be Turkish Airlines's A340 service from Istanbul to São Paulo-Guarulhos via Dakar. How a Turkish carrier is connecting Brazil and Africa is a story of our global age, and the news of its launch was bewildering and exciting when annouced last year, and it is sad but unsurprising to hear that it is ending in next month. The Dakar-South America connection has historically not been an uncommon one, but is fun and unique nowadays. (NB: Timetablist was waiting to board the 03:40 for Accra, in which it was decided to serve a full dinner at 4:30 in the morning.)