Chanchangi Air Lines: Abuja—Yola—Lagos, c.2012

After having considered the curiously named Med-View, Air Peace, and IRS Airlines, The Timetablist now introduces yet another chapter in the colorful and strange modern history of Nigerian commercial aviation by premiering Chanchangi Air Lines, which seemed to have existed from around 2003 to about 2012, although this odd, blurry social media graphic was posted in August 2013 to the airline's now quiet Facebook page.

The airline's Wikipedia article details its regional ambitions, but by the time the social media era came into full swing, the airline seems to have only served Abuja, Lagos, and Yola, the latter being the commercial airport closest to the carrier's founder's home village, for which the airline was named. 

Med-View Airline: Lagos to Jeddah, November 2017

An enticing picture of the corniche of Jeddah glows from Med-View Airline's social media accounts a year on from the previous post. However, Med-View does not serve Jeddah directly from Lagos; instead the connection is Kaduna—Kano—Jeddah, resurrecting Kano's former role as the northern international gateway for all of Nigeria. 

Supplementally confusing is the city list at the bottom; while the destinations listed there are among those Med-View serves, several of them (Enugu, Ilorin, Owerri, and Port Harcourt) including many of the more ambitious (Baltimore, Houston, Johannesburg, Lisbon) are not served by the airline, and no plans have been announced. This, too, is reminiscent of earlier episodes in Nigeria's airline history. 

IRS Airlines Advertisement, c.2007

If Arik Air doesn't offer the right route or a convenient schedule, the Nigerian air traveler's next option, at least a decade ago, might have been the reassuringly named IRS Airlines, which is even more non-Nigerian and strangely American in its livery, with a red-white-and-yellow emblem in the shape of an eagle's head, like a rejected US Postal Service logo, as seen on this magazine advertisement from about ten years ago, which marks the premier of this airline on The Timetablist.

What is not so reassuring is that the airline's Facebook Page has not been updated since 2011, and the airline's website isn't loading. Who knows where the initials came from, but at one point this curious carrier linked much of northern Nigeria, including Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Sokoto, and Yola with Abuja and Lagos as well as southern cities like Benin, Port Harcourt and Owerri.

Arik Air: the domestic destinations, c.2013

A detail from the previous post, showing Arik Air's domestic destinations: twenty cities across Nigeria, from Calabar to Katsina, in addition to the two hubs of Abuja and Lagos. Presumably the network is nearly identical to what has been featured before on the Timetablist, but has never been presented in the lipstick lustre of this ticket office display banner.

Nigeria Airways: Domestic Network, November 1981

The most obvious difference in juxtaposing the route map of Nigeria Airways in 1981 with Arik Air in 2012 is the centralization around hubs that has taken place in those decades. Here, the state carrier offered a diversity of linkages between major cities, with an array of flights connecting Kano, Jos, Enugu, Benin City and Kaduna. Even Yola and Markurdi have multiple options (although as with all route networks, the frequency of such flights is not clear).

Aside from the intricacy of this web,  the complete absence of Abuja is obvious. Today, this myriad span of domestic flights has been rationalized around a two-hub system split between Lagos and Abuja. Although airlines worldwide have consolidated into hub-and-spoke systems, it is tempting to see this transition as an allegory for the fate of the federal state and Nigerian society in these ensuing years.

As noted previously, Kano's status as a northern hub and intercontinental gateway has been erased. Note that the Ibadan-Benin City-Calabar service was suspended at the time.

See the previous post for Nigeria Airways's international network from 1981.

Arik Air: Domestic flights, October 2012

Following on from the previous post, the small corner detail of Arik Air's two-page route map spread shows the domestic operations of the de-facto flag carrier. Here, the airline's signature red and blue colors are used to differentiate operations out of Lagos Murtala Muhammed from flights fanning out of Abuja's Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, which actually has connections to more cities than the much larger commercial capital, acting as a hub in the middle of the country.

Arik Air: The Domestic Network from Abuja, 2011

In the aftermath of the collapse of first Nigeria Airways in 2003, then beloved Bellview in 2009, followed by the tortuous decline of Virgin Nigeria's once-grand plans for global presence, which underwent a confused transition to Nigeria Eagle Airlines and finally to the muted but still-competent Air Nigeria, Africa's most populous country seemed to lack a flag carrier.

But lately and quickly, that position has been taken on by the young Arik Air, which in a few years of operation has achieved what Virgin Nigeria once dreamed of: non-stop flights to the trifecta of premier destinations: New York, London and Johannesburg, which have been operated heretofore by A340-500s wet-leased from a Portuguese vendor.

The latest achievement is the news this week was that Arik has been granted FAA approval to fly its own, Nigerian-registered aircraft into the United States-- the first Nigerian airline in decades to enjoy this privilege.

Beyond its global ambitions, Arik has a strong domestic presence, shown in this and the following post, with two bases: one at the Federal Capital, Abuja, shown with the white aircraft hovering over a blue map, above, and the other at Murtala Mohammed Airport at Lagos, shown in the next entry.

Nigeria Airways: Detail of the Domestic and Regional Network, April 1966

Still Nigeria Airways, still all pink. The state airways corporation operated a zig-zaging domestic network, shown here as an inset of the previous post from April 1966.

Note how, in a wonderfully curious gesture, an arrow points northeast from Maiduguri, promoted as a gateway to the Middle and Far East. The North-Eastern State, gateway to Baghdad and Hong Kong. Today, Maiduguri has barely a handful of weekly domestic flights.

Kano, Nigeria's oldest airport, was the starting gate of the northern routes to Europe for both Nigeria Airways and other airlines, and at least today still has intercontinental attention from KLM.