Qatar Airways: Worldwide Network, 2011. Detail #2: Africa

Continuing from the previous post: in 2011, Qatar Airways hadn't reached nearly as far on the African continent as arch-rival Emirates, although it had started expanding in the region. Such major gateways as Dakar, Accra, and Addis Ababa are absent, as are oil-capitals such as Luanda or Malabo. Only Lagos in West and Central Africa. Service to Entebbe began in November that year. The Indian Ocean leisure destination Seychelles stands out, as does the historic tourism hub of Luxor in Egypt. 

Istanbul Atatürk Airport Departure Board, December 2017

Continuing from the previous post, some nine months and 12 hours later, the same departure monitor screens inside the Turkish Airlines lounge at Istanbul Atatürk Airport, showing the bank of midnight flights across the globe, with nearly as much activity as in midday. As at all hours, home town flag carrier Turkish dominates the schedule, again challenging even the geographically astute by linking to such unusual and far-flung destinations as Antananarivo, Kabul, Ufa and Seychelles. Turkey's other airlines make an appearance, with Onurair flying to Nalchek in the Russian Caucuses at twenty past 12AM, and the now-defunct AtlasGlobal with a delayed take-off to Baghdad.  

There are several regional rarities that make an appearance, including Turkmenistan Airlines to Ashgabat (here spelt Ashgabad) as was featured on the Timetablist last month. The rather sketchy SCAT Airlines takes off for the uranium town of Aktau on the Caspian Coast of Westernmost Kazakhstan at ten til 2AM. 

The destination most frequently listed in this time block is Tehran's Imam Khomeini Airport, listed 5 separate times, not only via Turkish at 11:45 but also Iranian carriers Aseman Airlines ("EP"), ATA Airlines (noted with the code "TBZ" as the very first entry) and Zagros Airlines at 2AM (also referred to with its longer ICAO code "IZG"). Since this time, according to the usually-reliable tables at Wikipedia, both ATA and Zagros no longer fly this route, nor indeed maintain a base at IKA altogether, shifting to solely domestic operations at Tehran's older secondary airport, Mehrabad International. 

One last mystery on the board are the two Egyptair flights MS9306 to Baku at 1:35 and MS9360 at 1:40 to Tokyo-Narita. They're frequent enough to be logged but what are these? Charter flights? 

International Departures from O.R. Tambo Airport, July 2017

Staying at the southern end of Africa, a schedule of three hours worth of international departures from O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, the busiest airport on the African continent. The board is dominated by hometown carrier South African Airways, with flights to Walvis Bay and Windhoek, both in Namibia; Lusaka, and Livingstone in Zambia; Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania and Entebbe in Uganda, as well as the final flight shown, to Harare, about two hours after Fastjet's flight to the Zimbabwean capital. 

Indian ocean airlines are also seen here: Air Mauritius and Air Seychelles leave ten minutes apart. Ethiopian Airlines connects to Addis Ababa. 

Kenya Airways: The Eastern and Southern Africa Routes, 2011.

A detail of the previous post showing the Kenya Airways network stretching across eastern and Southern Africa: non-stops to Gaborone and Johannesburg, and a inter-linked network of services to Lusaka, Lilongwe, Harare and Maputo, whereas Nampula in northern Mozambique is served non-stop. There are also direct flights to Lubumbashi and Ndola in the trans-national copperbelt, and flights stretching into the Indian Ocean to Antananarivo, Moroni and Victoria in the Seychelles. Zanzibar is connected to Mombasa, Bujumbura and Kigali are also linked. Flights northwards include Juba and in the Horn of Africa Addis Ababa and Djibouti.

Ethiopian Airlines: The East African Destinations, Spring 2013

Of the more than four dozen African cities that Ethiopian serves, it is particularly strong in its home region of East Africa.

Kenya Airways Destinations, 2011

The back Kenya Airways boarding passes in mid-2011 boasted of that airline's expanding reach. An exhaustive array of African arrival points, from Cotonou and Monrovia in the West, to Bangui, N'Djamena and Libreville in Central Africa, to Ndola, Lubumbashi and Lilongwe to the south, as well as Indian ocean island airports such as Antananarivo, Mayotte and Seychelles added with Juba, Bujumbura, and Malindi in its own backyard. These and others are intermixed with an increasingly impressive index of intercontinental entrepôts, including Guangzhou and Muscat. The next posts records the remainder of the more than 40 cities arranged here.

Kenya Airways: The African Network, mid-2010

Kenya Airways' rapid expansion across its home continent is evident in the great breadth and depth of this route map, especially in comparison with the same article from just a year previous.

Kenya is still predominant across its home region, connecting neighboring East African cities, but with a large number of southbound routes, including a new link to Gaborone, Botswana.

Although not the focus of this and the following post, redlines reaching the page's edges show links to Europe and Asia. The three European destinations are suggested to be above the top of the page, although both Amsterdam and Paris are located on the visible portion of Europe.

The next post details the route networks which stretch across the Central and Western portions of the continent.

South African Airways: Re-introduction of Johannesburg-Kinshasa service, 1994

Although two years after the issuance of the envelope in the previous post, this item still sports the apartheid-era Nassau Orange and Navy color scheme, and uses only South Africa's European languages. Sent in the same year as the election of Nelson Mandela, the purpose of this envelope was instead to celebrate the reappearance of South African flights on the continent of Africa itself, much of which had been off-limits due to anti-apartheid sanctions.

Although the service to Zaïre was the focus of this cover, the better part of the paper is taken up with a full, worldwide route map, showing SAA/SAL's trans-Indian services from Mauritius to Perth and Sydney, as well as Hong Kong and Taipei; a fascinating Rio de Janeiro focus city, linking New York and Buenos Aires to both Cape Town and Johannesburg; the service to Houston; and a dense interweave of lines around West Africa and across the Sahara to a multitude of European cities.

Without labels, its unclear what stop-overs were employed on these services, and what angles on the map are merely changes of direction, not pit-stops. This is especially the case as much of the continent had still not reauthorized the presence of the airline (note the pin balling of the route in and out of Abidjan, and the routes skirting around Madagascar). It seems certain that Europe was reached from a variety of refueling stations from Cape Verde and Canaries to Kano, Khartoum and Cairo.

South African Airways: Re-introduction of Johannesburg-Luanda, 1992

The re-introduction of intra-African services by South African Airways coincided with the gradual dismantling of the apartheid state, which culminated in the county's first democratic elections in 1994 (and would, years after that, see the airline shed its Orange-and-Blue color scheme and Afrikaaner initials). Prior to this, SAA had to skirt around jurisdictions, especially in Africa, which banned the carrier from operating in protest of the racist regime.

While marking the occasion of the return of Luanda, Angola, to the network, the airline's entire route map is displayed on the better part of the envelope. This reveals a cat's cradle strung around West Africa, and fanning out from Cape Verde to a host of European cities, as far inland as Vienna and apparently also including Manchester. Looking east, the airline apparently had to dodge Madagascar, and stop at the Seychelles before reaching southeast Asia, and the Cocos Islands before landing on the Australian continent.

A very similar map is provided two years later and shown on the next post.

South African Airways: Johannesburg-Seychelles-Hong Kong, June 1974

South Africa's state carrier alights to Hong Kong, with a stop in the Indian Ocean, commencing in 1974. The wings of SAL/SAA's classic springbok emblem beam like searchlights from its back and crown at the top of the graphic (a more ordinary version of the mark is seen on the cancellation stamp). The routing is absent from the map on the left of this first-day cover. Afrikaans is put in front of English on the envelope, two decades before the indigenous Zulu and Xhosa languages would come to prominence in a post-apartheid society.

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.

Air Seychelles Network, January 2011

A recent route map of Air Seychelles shows an airline much diminished from previous times, although still serving three continents with Boeing 767 jets.

Like its Indian Ocean counterparts, especially Air Mauritius and Air Madagascar, the national carrier of the Seychelles mostly concentrates on leisure services to Europe, which in this case included services to both London Heathrow and Gatwick, in addition to Paris, Rome, and Milan. Previous services to Frankfurt, Munich, Geneva, Zürich, Amsterdam, Madrid, Moscow and Paris-Orly have not lasted. The Gatwick service only lasted from 2010 and was recently terminated February 2011.

Aside from these services, Air Seychelles runs a single route to Chennai and on to Singapore. Previous routes to Dubai, Bangkok, and Mumbai were not successful, despite the cultural and business connections to India and southeast Asia. Likewise, its services to the African continent are spare: only Johannesburg. Not even its previous Nairobi route lasted. The airline seems to be having little success in becoming a hub carrier for traffic across the Indian Ocean, connecting Asia and Africa.

Air Mauritius: Worldwide Network, 2010

Air Mauritius has a thorough network to four continents. Given its remote location in the Indian Ocean, much of its operations are long-haul flights. Most of its fleet consists of A340/A330 widebodies, with three destinations in Australia, three in South Africa, three to India and three in East Asia-- as multi-continental as the island country's rich culture.

The next post details Air Mauritius's high-yield long-haul routes to Europe.

Air France: The African Routes, 1977. Detail #1: East Africa & the Indian Ocean

Compared to the Western portion of the continent, where Air France was absent in 1977 and is quite present today, the Eastern half of Africa was much more thickly webbed by Hippodrome jets than it is today.

Air France does not even service Nairobi any more, but it was an important way-station between Europe and the former colonies of the Indian Ocean, with a stretching nonstop from CDG. Similarly, its amazing to see Djibouti as a massive hub, linked in a Cairo-Jeddah-Addis Ababa axis and also linked to the entire Francophone archipelago.

Other Anglophone cities that Air France has since abandoned include Dar Es Salaam and Entebbe (linked to Athens) as well as the Ethiopian capital. Links between Paris, Mauritius and Madagascar remain important today, but the native carriers of the region take a sizable share of the loads on their wide-body jets to Europe. Mahé is no longer an Air France destination, and Bujumbura and Kigali were also dropped, but still served from northwestern Europe by Brussels Airlines.

See previous post for other portion of this route map.

Emirates: the African Routes, 2011

Fast-growing Emirates has 18 destinations on the African continent as of 2011.

Air France: The African Routes, July 2009

Air France and KLM, united as one company, dominate routes to Africa. Air France still serves nearly every former colonial capital, and KLM, an oil industry favorite, with strong East African services, overlays this network well. Taken with Skyteam's Kenya Airways affiliation, and the alliance is an African powerhouse (and a highly profitable venture).

Air India:Bombay to Seychelles, 1976

Celebrating inaugural of Air India's June 1976 service from Bombay to Seychelles with a mermaid/kama sutra-in-seashell theme.