Air Malta Network, Summer 2011

 

Malta has long acted as a crossroads of the Mediterranean: stage of empires, prophets, and crusades. Today it is a densely-populated, package-tour destination, home to a sizable contingent of Ryanair retirees, and more recently has earned a (dis)reputation as a corrupt tax haven. 

All these priorities are reflected in the reach of its long-operating flag carrier, Air Malta. There are numerous links in the eastern Mediterranean: Athens, Istanbul, and Larnaca, and eight airports in Italy, including several that don't see many foreign carriers, like Verona, or the cities on the nearby boot and isle of Sicily: Catania and Reggio Calabria—here making its Timetablist debut.

Likewise, there is an abundance of service to the UK and Germany, true to the island's nature as a holiday-break hub. Secondary cities such as Aberdeen, Leeds, and East Midlands in Britain and Bremen, Dresden, Hamburg, Hanover and Stuttgart in Germany. 

Curiously, the map also has small insets at left, with the central portion of the United States East Coast above, and the Gulf below. The former is marked with two destination dots: "Newark" and "Manhattan" while Abu Dhabi is denoted on the latter. However, Air Malta has never had either wide-body, long-haul aircraft nor has it ever served any long-haul destinations, not to the Middle East and certainly not transatlantically. These are surely some sort of code-share designation, but that is not explained; furthermore, unless Air Malta has a partnership with a Helicopter service, in no way does it actually serve Manhattan any more than any other airline, codeshare or not. 

Lufthansa: The Lost Russian Service, Summer 2012

Related to the post from last week about the withdrawal of Aeroflot's flights from Berlin-Tegel, the archival stacks of the Timetablist revealed a near-vintage item of relevance: a Lufthansa Systemwide Timetable from June-October 2012, graphically executed in the neat, straightforward Teutonic presentation that is classic Lufthansa—but issued only as a PDF instead of a bulkier booklet, a customer (and aviation nerd) service that, somewhat amazingly, Lufthansa still provides on its website. 

Although just four years old, the reference in the Timetablist library features over a dozen destinations that have since been terminated. In particular, Lufthansa has retreated remarkably from Russia, a zone it made great efforts to penetrate in the 1990s and 2000s. Relatedly included: LH's lost service from Munich to Donetsk, the metropolitan area of 2 million in eastern Ukraine which is now self-proclaimed as independent, which caused Lufthansa to withdraw in 2014. A year earlier, the thrice-weekly Frankfurt-Perm-Kazan operation was closed and then separately Yekaterinburg was dropped in December due to lack of profitability. 

The following year, services to Samara, Nizhniy Novgorod, and all flights to Moscow Vnukovo were curtailed (Lufthansa now only flies to Domodedovo). 

While several major non-Russian carriers still serve many of these airports—notably Turkish Airlines, which overtook Lufthansa to become now the largest foreign carrier in Russia—the disappearance of Lufthansa from secondary centers in Russia is an undeniable loss of prestige for these cities, and an evident effect of the decline of Russia's political and commercial ties with Germany. 2012 might not be that long ago, but much has changed. 

Onurair: Now Connecting to Turkey, July 2015

 Just as yesterday's post debuted a secondary Turkish airline connecting at Istanbul, today consists of another inaugural feature on the Timetablist: an advertisement of Onurair, yet another Kemalist carrier with a bland name and even more generic red logo. Marketed to hurried passengers at the tiny passenger terminal at Tegel Airport in Berlin, the poster excites the European traveler who wishes to reach Asia Minor—from large tourism gateways like Izmir, Bodrum and Antalya to more minor Anatolian destinations like Diyarbakir, Kayseri, and Gaziantep, all, apparently via Atatürk Airport. The journey can originate from major European hubs like Amsterdam and Berlin or secondary cities such as Stuttgart and Düsseldorf, to more obscure links such as Odessa and Nicosia. 

Turkish Airlines: the German destinations, 2013

In addition to its impressive array of African destinations, Turkish Airlines, now the world's seventh largest carrier, is heavily focussed on services to Germany, principally given the large number of Turkish immigrants, so it offers flights to a dozen German cities, in many cases offering some of the few services outside of the European Union from smaller airports such as Bremen, and tiny Friedrichshafen on the Bodensee. Most flights are to Istanbul Ataturk. Larger urban centers, including Düsseldorf, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt host multiple, daily operations to a half dozen Turkish cities, including leisure destinations like Antalya as well as secondary urban centers such as Adana and Trabzon.

Swissair: The European Network, c.1951

The routes of Swissair, "to everywhere" only reached as far as Iraq, New York, Spain and Denmark in 1951.

Air Malta: Routes Serviced, April-October 2011

A table of Air Malta weekly flights, showing 34 airports Malta's flag carrier serves on its own each week in the summer, and also 12 airports served by one of several partner airlines such as bmi, Brussels Airlines and Etihad. The airline serves a large number of cities in both Italy and Germany (including Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, and Stuttgart), connecting several cities from each country every day to the Mediterranean island. There are no services to anywhere in nearby North Africa, however.

Aegean Airlines: The Western European Routes, Summer 2012

The route map of Aegean Airlines, the private Greek carrier that has zoomed from Start-up to Star Alliance member in a matter of years. Solid-lines denote year-round services, mainly from Athens but also to Germany (Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Munich) from Thessaloniki, while dashed-lines indicate summer service, which includes flights from Heraklion to Paris, Brussels and Munich.

Belleair Network, January 2011

A two-page spread from Belleair's in-flight magazine features the Albanian airlines's somewhat aspirational route map of Europe. Existing destinations--presumably all from Tirana--are some twenty Italian airports plus Stuttgart, Zurich, Liege in Belgium, and Pristina, in Kosovo. These are surrounded by a number of other capitals, which are given equal billing but designated with yellow and blue points. These are charter destinations (in blue) and "future destinations" (in yellow)-- what plans are in the works to reach Dortmund or Dresden, Maastricht or Malmö is not made clear, but the lovely cursive script at upper left declares that Belleair is "growing together."

United/Continental's Nonstop B757 Transatlantic Routes Are Stopping, 2012

A map which accompanied a recent Washington Post article on the increasingly-frequent use of narrowbody B757s on increasingly long routes to Europe from the East Coast, which inevitably end up as less than nonstop when facing winter jet streams. The article singles out United/Continental for this colorful graphic, but the text also mentions USAirways routes out of Philadelphia and American Airlines's rampant employment of the 757. The article also lists several unusual airports receiving unscheduled intercontinental flights, such as Bangor, Maine, Albany, and Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York.

Lufthansa: Stuttgart-Bathurst-Rio de Janeiro

Speaking of routes linking Europe and South America via the Cape Verde coast of Africa, here is a colorful artifact celebrating Lufthansa's long history of serving the German-speaking enclaves of South America ("since 1934") and the service linking Stuttgart and Rio de Janeiro with a stop in Bathurst, Gambia (now Banjul), in November 1970--showing it isn't Dakar who gets all the action. Despite the maps and imagery, the envelope lacks the usual Lufthansa details such as aircraft type and flight number.

Olympic Airways: European Network, 2005-2006

A continuation of the previous post, with more details of the European network.