Kunming Airlines Routes, 2011-12

Two web-ads promoting the destinations of Kunming Airlines, a small, young Chinese airline, from its un-Romanized website. One advertisement uses the old roadside directional-signs-on pole image to note the cities, while the other seems to have devolved from an archaic compass-and-parchment map idea to then be overlaid with warped jpgs of the cities in question.

Both advertisements boast the same three flight schedules: Kunming-Changzhou (常州) -Dalian; a second, zigzagging route from Kunming to Chongqing and then Taizhou (台州) in Zhejiang Province; and thirdly a north-south Kunming-Changsha-Shijiazhuang line.

The airline's Wikipedia article lists a different roster of routes, but that is probably out of date, having been last updated in 2009. Commercial aviation in China is growing rapidly, and little Kunming airlines has only been in existence since 2005. Kunming Airlines's home page offers fares on flights to Xiamen, Guiyang, Harbin, Shenzhen, Qingdao, and Nanning as well as other cities across central China.

Tianjin Airlines Destinations, 2012

The destination map from Tianjin Airlines's English-language website, which, like Shandong Airlines's map, is only partially interactive and is not itself Romanized. Visitors can scroll their cursor over the cities' (Chinese) names, which then enlarge, but these cannot then be selected to show routes from that city, as is common on more advanced interactive maps. The message also blots out a central part of the territory, concealing a handful of destinations. Altogether it makes for only a cursory understanding of the airlines's system.

However, its clear that the airline is particularly prominent in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, with the airlines's Wikipedia article stating that both Hohhot and Ürümqi are secondary hubs.

The next post will detail the destinations in the southern portion of the map.

Shandong Airlines: The Northern Destinations, 2012

The top half of Shandong Airlines's semi-interactive online destination map, from its website, which at least has an English-language version, unlike some of its sister carriers. The flight routes, whose addition is awaited at the direction of the yellow message box at center, never materialized on a recent visit. Such information would have been enlightening, as the fast-growing airlines of China do not have up-to-date articles on Wikipedia, although that reporting, from July 2010, also lists international flights to Korea and Japan, which are not shown here.

It can be presumed that the major cities of the Shandong Province, principally its supercity Qingdao and its capital Jinan are primary hubs, but most of the major cities of the northeast: Shenyang, Dalian, Tianjin, as well as Beijing itself and the large cities at its south such as Shijiazhuang, Xi'an and Zhengzhou, are all noted here, as is far-off Urumqi.

The next post will feature the lower half of the same map.

Shenzhen Airlines Destinations, 2012.

Like Chengdu, the southern supercity of Shenzhen has its own namesake airline.

Unlike the posts from earlier this month, the super-dense city labels of Shenzhen Airlines's destination map are Romanized, but feature some interesting spellings, seemingly rendered directly from Chinese: Urumqi is transcribed as Wulumuqi, and Harbin is Haerbin. Like Hainan Airlines, the route network that connects these cities in not featured, so it is difficult to determine just how interconnected these cities are.

The next post will detail some of the southernly services, including an array of international flights to many of the capitals of southeast Asia.

Hainan Airlines: Domestic Destinations, January 2012

The dense domestic destination map for Hainan Airlines, which uniquely color-codes cities by their political status, with blue labels marking a "Municipality & Provincial Capital" and a light-green label designating a "Non-provincial capital" with most cities pinpointed by black dots. However, no less than eight cities--chief among them Beijing, Xi'an, Dalian, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Urumqi, and Haikou--are represented by Hainan's new phoenix-wing emblem, which the key simply notes as a "base of Hainan Airlines." The map lacks route lines which would better explain Hainan's mainland system--but its an attractive illustration, nonetheless, and unquestionably an impressive operation.

Yakutia Air Company: Munich to Irkutsk non-stop, 2011

Twice weekly to the natural paradise on Lake Baikal, boasts this rather straightforward notice from the Munich Airport summer timetable. Russia is one of Germany's most important trading partners, but it is still interesting to see such low-profile Russian carriers such as Yakutia Air Company linking Bavaria and Siberia. The service is seasonal.

Yakutia's primary base at Yakutsk links the Sakha Republic with Seoul, Harbin, Qingdao; from the Irkutsk Oblast in serves Dushanbe and Tashkent. The airline also has a seasonal presence at Prague, Barcelona, Larnaca, Rimini, Trieste, Dresden and Hanover.

Korean Air: Chinese Destinations, 2011

China has been a major growth market for global aviation, and Korean Air has successfully marketed its new hub at Incheon as a convenient connection to the mainland, with hundreds of flights each week to more than a dozen destinations. See other posts from today for domestic and Japanese networks.