Tunisair Network, Early 2017

Tiny Tunisair is growing. Now extending to four continents, with extensive connections to metropolitan France (Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Toulouse) as part of more than two-dozen European destinations, including third-level cities like Belgrade and Düsseldorf. 

The Western Africa network is not as extensive as other carriers, but Tunis is now connected to seven francophone sub-Saharan capitals, from Nouakchott to Niamey. Three routes to the Middle East are sustained: Beirut, Jeddah and Medina, which is misplaced on this otherwise straightforward graphic representation. Not every venture has met with success, as the airline's flights to Dubai were scrapped, as has been previously reported here. 

Pride of the carrier is the airline's most distant service: the year-old long-haul link to Montreal, Tunisair's first wide-body, trans-Atlantic operation. 

Royal Air Maroc Network, November 1983

The state carrier of the Kingdom of Morocco has always had a uniquely-diverse network, with a strong presence in its home region of North and Western Africa, a dense array of flights across Western Europe, and a handful of long-range services overseas.

This is only more so today, but thirty years ago Royal Air Maroc already offered flights to half a dozen West African capitals, as far south as Libreville. All of them francophone except for tiny Malabo.

Francophonia features prominently across the network, linking seven cities in metropolitan France, from tiny Lille to Toulouse and Bordeaux. Much father afield, one of longest flights is to Montreal via New York, a route which the airline still serves today.

Interestingly, South America was also reached, with a single flight connecting Rio and Sao Paulo. At the eastern end of its extent, RAM's jets found their way to Damascus, Kuwait, and several other cities in the Middle East.

In this blood orange graphic (the larger background is a sunset photo), the Montreal-New York-Casablanca-Cairo-Jeddah route is emphasized in bold, for reasons unclear.

This image was derived from a post on Royal Air Maroc page of the encyclopedic Timetable Images blog. 

Tunisair network, 2014

An unfortunately-terrible iPhone 4 photo, taken at the beginning of a Friday at the airport in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, shows the large window-sized map at the Tunisair ticket office.

The airline's entire network is shown, but extra care has been taken to pinpoint the Burkinabe capital, one of Tunisair's newest destinations. All flights are shown directly from Tunis, although TU395 actually operates as a twice-weekly Tunis-Ouagadougou-Bamako service, using one of Tunisair's A320s. The map displays these Sahelian cities alongside the airline's expanding West African network: Abidjan, Dakar and Nouakchott. Closer to home, Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, Tripoli, and Cairo are connected along the north African coast, and Beirut, Jeddah, Riyadh, and Kuwait being the other destinations in the Arab world.

Tunisair serves a particularly dense network in Europe, from Belgrade to Bordeaux to Brussels to Barcelona.

Air Afrique: The schedule from Dakar, 1990

Finishing this Air Afrique week on Timetablist, the schedule from Dakar's Yoff Airport, the multinational airline’s second home. Flights far and wide are displayed here, including cities far outside of the airline’s own network, from Bangkok to Chicago. In Europe, West Berlin and Bucharest are helpfully shown, while Atlanta (connection to Delta or Eastern) and Addis Ababa (connecting to Ethiopian at Abidjan) are featured as well. Special thanks again to Airline Memorabilia for the original posting.

Air Afrique: The schedule from Paris, 1990

Our second Air Afrique week continues, as does the cross-posting from Airline Memorabilia of the mid-1990 schedule from Air Afrique. This page rounds out the last of the Ouagadougou connections and starts the listings to and from Paris Charles de Gaulle, the premier destination for the multinational airline. Near-daily DC-10s departed from the primary hubs of Abidjan and Dakar (the schedule includes UTA DC-10s and B747s), while connections to Accra on Ghana Airways are shown below. UTA and Air Afrique also shared direct and on-stop connections from Bamako, Bangui, and Brazzaville.

Same-plan service as well as interline connections via the bigger gateways are shown for Cotonou and Lomé, while other airlines provide connections to Conakry, Lagos and Monrovia. Interestingly, service to secondary French cities such as Bordeaux and Marseille are shown as non-stops, meaning Air Afrique A300s and DC-10s landed in Southern France before reaching Roissy.

Air Afrique: The schedule from Abidjan, 1990 (continued)

Continuing with Air Afrique's summer 1990 schedule from Abidjan, originally posted on Airline Memorabilia. Here is the second page of the Abidjan schedule:

Alphabetically, the index begins with non-stop flights on UTA French Airlines to Nice on the weekends. Flights within the West African network, to Nouakchott, Ouagadougou,  Pointe Noire (via Brazzaville), and Yaoundé operate just a few times per week on an A-300.

There are near-daily connections to Paris, either in-directly via another Air Afrique city, or direct once weekly on a DC-10, in addition to the non-stop UTA services to CDG.

Interestingly, there is a single Thursday non-stop to Rio de Janeiro on-board VARIG listed. Other flights, to Rome, Stockholm, Tokyo, Toronto, Vienna, Washington (connecting at JFK on Pan Am) and Zürich. The section on Accra starts with flights to Brussels.

BMI Regional: Brand-new destinations from Birmingham, May 2013

A lazy snap of a billboard at an airport roundabout; that peculiar zone of travelers and their company, heading to and from the aerodrome. Surely the intended audience already has their passage arranged? Maybe next time.

In this case, Birmingham International, whose glory days of flag carriers and intercontinental widebodies are distant, but which still hosts a variety of carriers to points across Europe, and a few beyond.

Here, BMI Regional, that remnant rump of the erstwhile international carrier, British Midland, is actually expanding, even as its long-range flagships have been absorbed into the fleet of British Airways, which no longer flies to Birmingham at all. Britain's great industrial metropolis is now linked to a rather random foursome of short-haul hops to Scandinavia and France: Billund, Denmark, Gothenburg, Sweden, and Lyon and Toulouse in southern France. Brazilian regional jets do the journeys.

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.