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. 

Air Liban to Europe and Africa, c.1952

 Prior to becoming Middle East Airlines, the flag carrier of Lebanon was known as Air Liban. Formed in 1945, it quickly expanded across Southwest Asia, Europe and into Africa as reflected in the destination list on this vintage brochure: Near East destinations include Aleppo and Baghdad, and fourth city is listed Jerusalem—a somewhat remarkable historical phenomenon, although this likely references the old Atarot Airport, at the time located in the Jordanian-annexed West Bank. Regardless, "Jerusalem" makes its Timetablist debut here. 

Further into the Gulf extends a spine of Jeddah—Dhahran—Doha—Kuwait; it is important to realize that, long before the rise of thee Gulf super-carriers, MEA/Air Liban was the primary airline of the Arab World, as its expansive name implies. 

Looking Westward, Air Liban ran its "swift Super DC-6C planes" to Nicosia, Ankara, Istanbul and to its only Western European capital, Paris, while send a second route to Cairo and Tripoli, with its most southernly service across the Red Sea to Khartoum, then spanning the vast Sahara to reach Kano, Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, and finally terminating at Dakar. This unusual number of West African destinations linked the Syrian-Lebanese commercial diaspora of coastal urban West Africa to their homeland. 

Libyan Arab Airlines Network, 1977

Following on from the previous post, here is a newspaper advertisement for Libyan Arab Airlines from a few years later, which centers around substantially the same route map from 1974, but without the excursion across the Sahara (no Khartoum, Agadez, nor Niamey), with only the addition of Frankfurt, Damascus and Jeddah in the intermittent years, and with Geneva substituted by Zürich.

The map is also, except for Sebha, absent the extensive domestic network—perhaps not provided for this circumstance, which appears to be aimed at the business traveler to the "Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" —"*Libya1 flies the best reasons," it declares, boasting of its 40x weekly Tripoli-Benghazi shuttle service, its "whisper" quiet B-727-200s, and its growth rate. The copy concludes with the emphatic: "We are Libya 1." which isn't precisely grammatically correct. 

ALIA: The Royal Jordanian Airline Network, 1984-85

A loose cartography to show the route system of Alia: The Royal Jordanian Airline in the mid-1980s, when the carrier had ambitiously reached four continents, but had not yet been rebranded as simply "Royal Jordanian' —the Alia was the name of the King Hussein's daughter, the Princess, a very curious nomenclature for a commercial carrier. 

The map spreads out the many European destinations served from Amman, as many as 15 apparently, including the somewhat unusual cities such as Belgrade and Bucharest; although these lesser cities likely saw the B707 and B727, at the time, the L-1011 was becoming the workhorse of the fleet. 

Most notably, Alia carried the crown of Hashemite throne to distant Chicago and distant Los Angeles, via Vienna, as well as New York via Amsterdam, possibly utilizing the airline's B747-200s, of which there were as many as three during the 1980s. Today the successor carrier still serves O'Hare, non-stop with debasing graphite-grey B787 Dreamliners.

Alia offered a comprehensive schedule across its immediate region, from Tripoli and Tunis in North Africa to Beirut and Damascus in the Levant to the many capitals of the Gulf—note that the map once again takes its liberties, showing the Doha-Muscat link leaping to the left, making room for the Dubai-Karachi connection below. The two east Asian services, nonstops to Bangkok and Singapore, are set apart. Looking closely, the airline's sole domestic destination, Aqaba, is shown directly below the hub.

Aviogenex System Route Map, c.1989

An undated route map, found in a dusty display case on the upper level of the Aeronautical Museum of Yugoslavia on the grounds of Aerodrom Nikola Tesla in Belgrade, Serbia. A conventional map of Europa is overlaid with the red lines of the complete Aviogenex system during the Yugoslavian airline's prime. Although a subsidiary of the Belgrade-based Generalexport conglomerate (as the map prominently notes at the bottom), the leisure airline's impressive array of coverage emanated out of the Croatian coast, with the largest bases at Pula in Istria, and Split and Dubrovnik in Dalmatia, marked by large red bullseyes around their place names. Other large stations at Zadar and inland at Zagreb and Ljubljana and what looks to be Titograd (today Podgorica, Montenegro).

From here, the red-striped Aviogenex jets plunged further south across the Mediterranean from Algiers to Benghazi to Beirut. A single branch outward from Zagreb splays outward and off the map (to what is probably Aqaba, Jordan) and turns northeastward to spread to Leningrad, Helsinki, and Oslo.

Aviogenex was even more impressive in northwestern Europe, with intense coverage of Germany, France and especially the British Isles. So dense was this network that it demanded a unique cartographic feature of this map, as Aviogenex's home hubs in the Balkans had to been repeated at the mouth of the English Channel, underneath Ireland, to adequately show the web of connections to 16 cities. These included not just Birmingham and Leeds (as with the rest of the map rendered in Croatian Latin script, here spelled "Lidz") but many smaller airports such as Cardiff, Bristol, Bournemouth and Norwich. Perhaps most intriguing is what appears to be Kirkwall Airport in the Orkney Islands, which even today in the great Thomas Cook package tour era of cheap charters is not connected to the Canaries or Balearics, much less Montenegro.

This is reflective of the enormous popularity of Yugoslavia as a British tourism destination in the 1980s, when it was even more popular than Spain and Yugotours was one of the UK's most popular tour agencies, which all declined with the 1990s break-up and war. While Aviogenex was not a victim of this catastrophe, it was shadow of its former self and limped along until 2015, meeting its demise just before the latest explosion in Adriatic leisure aviation.

KLM Route Network, 1982.

Zooming ahead several decades from yesterday's post, a circuit-board cartography shows the six-continent, circumnavigational system of KLM. Reminiscent of the powerful, dynamic abstractions of Lufthansa's famous spinnernetz Streckenatlas of the same era, the Royal Dutch route network is simplified into web of trunk routes, yielding only general information of the intercontinental connectivity performed by the carrier. Likewise, the continents are represented with mind-bending liberties; Alaska and South America in particular bearing only slight resemblance to their true shapes. The top portion of the literature shows four of KLM's ultramodern jetliners, especially the flagship B747-200Bs, DC-8s and DC-10s. 

It is always remarkable to look back at the route maps of European flag carriers in this era, when more African capitals were served than American cities. Like many of those state airlines of the early jet age, KLM linked Europe to South America via the western edge of Africa, with Casablanca, Tangiers, and Freetown linked together in a right angle which continues on to Monrovia, Accra, Lomé and Lagos, making a northward left at Kano. A single line shoots off of Morocco for Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, ending at Santiago (nearly identical to Iberia's route shown in the previous post). Today, KLM still serves all of these Mercosur cities, except for Montevideo. 

An eastern route crosses the Mediterranean to Cairo, onward to Khartoum, with an elbow passing through Nairobi—Kilimanjaro—Dar Es Salaam to end at Johannesburg. To this day KLM still flies to these three east African cities; indeed, KLM is the only European airline to fly to Kilimanjaro, but sadly and surprisingly, Cairo has been terminated, as was Khartoum. 

TAROM Romanian Airlines: Worldwide Routes, c.1974

Continuing to look at the global extent of the airlines of the Eastern Bloc at their height, this unique map shows the routes of TAROM, the Romanian state carrier spreading across four continents. 

There are plenty of routes within Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, culminating in an interesting Bucharest—Prague—Amsterdam—New York schedule as its sole operation across the Atlantic. This route may or may not have stopped in Gander—it is difficult to be certain as the cartography inconsistently marks destinations, with the red lines variously pass over or turn at a city without a marker, or break at a city on the map, or such breaks are marked by a circle around the underlying city.  

Several lines cross the Mediterranean to Algiers and Tripoli (possibly by way of Benghazi) in a similar vein to Czechoslovak Airlines. 

     

What is unquestionably the most notable aspect of the airline's operation occurs on the southeastern corner of the map: the long, winding tentacle reaching its way from Bucharest to Istanbul, then onward to Tehran and then reaching Karachi, where it elbow-bends along the Indus and over the Himalayas to reach Urumchi in Chinese Turkestan, where it continues across the vast People's Republic, where it seems to waystation at Hami, Yumen, and Taiyoun to finally terminate at Beijing. 

With just a little over 100,000 people live in tiny Yumen City, in Gansu province, which doesn't even boast an airport. While Hami, a small outpost in Xinjiang, has a regional airport, and Taiyoun's Wusu International is the principal airport of Shanxi Province, there are few international flights, and no European service, from these three cities. This trans-Socialist aviation envoy is surely a rarity in aviation history. 

Lufthansa: The Worldwide Network, Part 2: The Afro-South American System.

Continuing from the previous post, it is, as always, interesting to note the enormous number of African destinations that were once served by European airlines. Lufthansa flew to a great many more African cities than today, shown here in three trunk lines extending across the Mediterranean. In the east, a route to Khartoum turns at Addis Ababa to make its way to Entebbe, then on to Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, where the line splits to terminate at Mauritius or further south to Johannesburg, which meets the central trunk from Tunis—Tripoli to Accra, Lagos and then Kinshasa, shown cluster together in the Bight of Benin. Many of these sub-Saharan services have been presented on the Timetablist before.

In the Western Mediterranean, a third line passes again through North Africa and continues straight across Dakar towards South America. turning only slightly at Rio de Janeiro, plunging further to Sao Paulo—Montevideo—Buenos Aires and turning 90 degrees to finish to Santiago, which is also linked along the Andes to northernly American cities.

As it has so many times in the past, Timetablist would like to express its appreciation for Flickr user caribb (Doug from Montreal)'s incredible collection, and to say thanks  for allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons.

ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines Route Map, 1982

Keeping with the history of Czechoslovak Airlines, we return to the amazing album of  Flickr user Caribb's incredible collection, this photo showing the route map of ČSA in a similar arrangement to the previous set of posts.

While still a pinwheel arrangement with Prague as its central hub, the network appears on a red field rather than concentric orbs. Long-haul routes are sparser than the previous decade: IL-62s still cross the Atlantic to New York, Montreal, Havana, (the timetable of which we covered years ago in an early post) and there are still trans-Asia flights reaching to Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore via Bombay or through Athens are all the same, but Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta are out.

The Kuwait—Abu Dhabi schedule operates via Cairo. North Africa still well represented with Algiers, Casablanca, and Tunis—Tripoli.

One of the other shots Caribb has in his online gallery is a plan of the IL-62, which curiously show smoking and non-smoking sections adjacent to each other for the entire length of the cabin.

Bratislava again appears in the upper-right, with a few Eastern bloc international connections and domestic routes in dark ink.

As it has so many times in the past, Timetablist would like to express its appreciation for Flickr user caribb (Doug from Montreal)'s incredible collection, and to say thanks  for allowing the reuse of these images under creative commons.

ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines: the African Routes, c.1970

Quite similar to the last post, this later iteration of the Czechoslovak route network is equally dense but a bit clearer. Dozens of routes fan out from Prague, across Europe, North Africa and onward to Asia and the Americas. Another web spins out from Bratislava, but these are confined to Europe. 

Geneva looks to be bypassed on the way to Casablanca, from whence the flight continues to Dakar, then apparently just to Freetown, although confusingly Conakry is shown as a dot on the route line, it's lowercase suggests it might not have been a pit stop. Additionally, dashed lines show what are likely some sort of connecting services, linking Dakar to Bamako and Freetown to Abidjan, Accra, and Lagos. 

ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines: The African Routes, 1968

Fast-forwarding nearly half a century from the last post, but still considering the long history of
ČSA Czechoslovak Airlines. Here is the carrier at its zenith, a four-continent flag carrier hoisting the socialist banner aloft across the globe. This detail from a route map, from about 1968, shows a dense network fanning out from Prague. While much of the quintessential cities of the earliest route spine remain: Belgrade, Zagreb, Warsaw, Budapest, and many more routes radiate outward from Central Europe. The red lines around Vienna and Bratislava are quite dense, clustering at Athens to continue into Asia.

Across the Mediterranean, there are non-stop flights from Ruznye to Algiers and Tunis—Tripoli. Further east, several lines seem to spread out from Geneva, one of which continues southward to Casablanca and then onward to Dakar and Freetown. In a clear echo of Interflug's West African service featured here last month, it seems the post-colonial promises of realignment prompted a Pan-African operation from Prague. Somewhat confusingly, Monrovia, Liberia, is marked in a red circle, but the routing does not connect it. Perhaps a typo? Perhaps meant to indicate Conakry? 

Lufthansa: Lost Destinations from the Summer of 2012

For space considerations, the other (non-Russian) worldly destinations that have lost their Lufthansa patronage since 2012 have been cordoned into this separate post. There are three continents hosting less Lufthansa than before, but the only mainline European city that is out is tiny Trondheim, Norway (a first for the Timetablist here), which was curiously served once a week by an aging B737-400.

Asia has been particularly affected: the long-haul connections to Jakarta (via Singapore) and Kuala Lumpur  (via Bangkok) could consistently work. More recently, Lufthansa has lost out to the Gulf three, and curtailed its dedicated flight to Abu Dhabi, and truncated the Muscat extension of its Frankfurt-Riyadh flights (although LX243, the Zürich-Dubai-Muscat connection on SWISS listed here, still operates today).

More dire but less surprising are the loss of further African services: no news that Tripoli has been abandoned, and Pointe-Noire's petrol-club PrivatAir B737-800 service via Libreville had its run, but less happy the abandonment of once-promising Asmara and long-served Khartoum, surely and sadly uneconomic nowadays.  Also, lamentably, Caracas has likewise sunk into a less-viable abyss and receives fewer and fewer international airlines.  Lufthansa closed down its Venezuelan outpost in May this year. 

Swissair: The African Destinations, Winter 1972

Continuing from yesterday's post, it is somewhat astonishing to consider today that at the height of its reach, Swissair served more cities in Africa than any other external continent (17 African destinations compared to 14 across Asia). Particularly dense are the West African capitals, six airports from Dakar to Douala (the only non-capital besides Johannesburg on the map). Past Cameroon, francophone Libreville and Kinshasa are also connected, whereas in East Africa, Anglophone Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam are linked via formerly-British Khartoum.

To match the astonishment of the extent of the Swissair network in the early 1970s is to note that today, the successor Swiss International Air Lines only flies to Johannesburg and Dar Es Salaam.

Special thanks again to Flickr user caribb (Doug from Montreal) for allowing his collection to be featured here. 

Congo par Sabena, 1954

A domestic route map of sixty years ago looks much more impressive than the meagre network of Korongo today. Sabena offered services to no less than thirty airports in the vast Belgian colony, with what looks to be busy stations not only at the capital Leopoldville, and the principal regional administrative outposts at Elizabethville and Stanleyville, but throughout the interior of the enormous territory.

There were more than half a dozen routes via various way stations to the metropole in Brussels, including Tripoli, Casablanca, and Rome; all the routes from the capital connected at Kano, which must have been quite an operation in its own right.

In addition, regional African routes spanned the territorial border in all directions: from Leopoldville to Portuguese Luanda and Johannesburg, which also had a link to Elizabethville; from Albertville to Dar Es Salaam, from Libenge to Bangui, in French Equatorial Africa. Not especially the route to Entebbe and Nairobi, especially how Kigali lies within the realm of Belgian Central Africa at this time.

Afriqiyah Airways Network, 2011

A destination map of sorts, printed on the window shade of the Afriqiyah Airways ticket office, which now sits fading in the West African sun as the airline vacated in the office some time in 2011 due to its global grounding as a result of the Libyan revolution.

Previous to its sudden suspension, Afriqiyah was a surging force in trans-African transportation, connecting via its main hub at Tripoli to 14 West and Central African destinations as well as Johannesburg, transferring these intercontinental services to an array of European cities, from Düsseldorf to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Rome, as shown here, although the labels for each red dot are scattered, with Jeddah off the coast of Australia, Bangui near Antarctica, Ouagadougou and N'Djamena in the Indian Ocean, Khartoum at the Maldives, Abidjan near the Falklands, Kinshasa near Cape Town, Niamey near the Cape Verde Islands, Rome near Arkhangelsk, London north of Greenland.

Farther afield, Afriqiyah flew to a handful of Asian destinations: Jeddah and Dubai, predictably, somewhat randomly to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and distant Beijing.

Since the partial cessation of hostilities in still-volatile post-Qaddafi Libya, Afriqiyah has operated a diminished network, with services to Jeddah, Düsseldorf, London but not a single sub-Saharan city.

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.

British Airways: The African Routes, c.2008

British Airways, a conservative carrier steeped in tradition, rarely makes changes, particularly to its unique route map illustration, which looks quite similar to this version from the beginning of the decade. 

The only changes are the loss of direct BA services to Harare, and the absence of the Dakar-Freetown route. The former is still on the map, but only as part of the South African-centered Comair network.

Since this printing, Dar Es Salaam dropped from the schedule just this past March, and only last week BA announced the end of its historic service to Lusaka-- two legacy routes to former colonies that can no longer be commercially justified.

Accra Kotoka Airport Monday Evening Departures, November 2011

Continuing from the previous post, the Monday evening departures table shows a host of intercontinental carriers leaving Accra for distant destinations in Europe and elsewhere. This includes both Kotoka's traditional standbys, KLM to Amsterdam and British Airways to London, as well as new-comers such as Emirates to Dubai at 5:30, Turkish Airlines to Istanbul, United Airlines to Washington Dulles, TAP to Lisbon, and Afriqiyah Airways to Tripoli.

Also seen here are southern hemispheric services, specifically South African Airways non-stop to Johannesburg and Air Namibia to Jo'berg via Windhoek. There are only a handful of regional departures to Lagos in the late afternoon as well as an Air Ivoire flight at 8PM to Lomé.

Ghana Airways: The External Services, November 1962

During the same time frame as yesterday's newspaper advert, boasting of a Second-generation jet service from Ghana Airways, the above map showed the extent of the airline's international network, or as it uniquely says here, its "External Services."

The route includes the classic West African littoral ply from Lagos to Dakar via Abidjan, Monrovia (Robertsfield), Freetown, Conakry, and Bathurst. Also included in West Africa is hops north to Ouagadougou and Bamako, the second of which interestingly continues north to Tunis, then Zürich followed by Prague, and finally ending at Moscow. This was the era when President Kwame Nkrumah was courting Eastern overtures as well as Western in the immediate post-independence period. This triangulation would manifest itself most visibly at Ghana Airways, which received a handful of Illyushin Il-18s, as can be seen at lower left underneath the Dougla DC-3s and in adjacent corners from its other fleet types, the British Vickers Viscount and Bristol Brittania. The Soviet props were employed only for Ghana Airway's intra-African routes, such as the stretches to Khartoum and Cairo which then went on to Beirut on a weekly basis.

But Ghana's back was not turned away from its colonial parent, as can be seen from the air company's dual routes to London, one via Tripoli and Rome, the other direct non-stop, the longest route for the company at the time.

This item has been reposted from the incredible website Timetable Images, as is from the collection of Bjorn Larsson. The Timetablist would like to thank Timetable Images and Mr. Larsson for generously allowing reposting. 

Service from Malta to Tunis and Tripoli, Summer 2011

Malta, the European Union's smallest member, is a tiny rocky archipelago in the center of the Mediterranean below Sicily. It is actually more southernly than the coast of North Africa, and acts as a European gateway to Libya especially.

Shown here on the Malta International Airport's summer 2011 timetable are weekly services to Tripoli, with an identical flight every day by Libyan Arab Airlines complimented by an array of daily flights from Air Malta, with a twice weekly connection on JAT which goes onward to Belgrade.

Above are four weekly services to Tunis, direct and also via Monastir on Servisair. All these operations increase during the summer months, as seen from the matrix at far right.