Fly Somon Air, October 2016

Staying in the Central Asian region, and focusing on the here is a banner display stand for the privately-owned Tajikistani carrier, Somon Air—just the sort of unusual advertisement that can be encountered in Dubai as in few other places in the world. The colorful PVC print uses the classic sign-post image, pointing to Frankfurt, Istanbul, Moscow, as well as the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, just one of about ten Russian cities the airline serves. Dubai itself is mentioned, as well as the Kazakh business center of Almaty. Curiously, the Tajikistani capital, Dushanbe, is not listed—perhaps to de-emphasize the likely-inconvenient connections at the little airline's tiny, out-of-the-way hub. Somon Air's flagship wingleted B737-800 soars overhead. 

Turkmenistan Airlines: Route Map, c.2016

This rather incredible specimen is featured on the non-official website of Turkmenistan Airlines—or at least one of the most prominent, as there is apparently more than one...which is in a way helpful, as the flag carrier of the Republic of Turkmenistan seems to lack an English language presence on the worldwide web. 

Despite this curious lack of official online connectivity, Turkmenistan Airlines does spread its gloriously evergreen-accented fleet across Asia and Europe, as seen here on this odd warp-grid projection which appears to converge at 0º Lattitude 0º Longitude, cut off at the bottom-left. 

Other than this Dr. Strangelove-sound-studio meets 2004 internet aesthetic, the route network itself is is also a bit skewed, with different cities in larger and smaller typeface at random, "Pekin" Minsk, Moscow and Frankfurt seem important, Amritsar, Donetsk, Istanbul and Lviv somehow less so. This usual airline shows up in a few unexpected places, especially its farthest western reach, "Birminghem," which does not see very much foreign metal, nor does it seem to possess a Central Asian community of any size, yet has apparently captured a segment of the Midlands-to-India market. 

There was a rather severe hiccup when the airline was banned from European Union air space from February to late 2019, which left passengers suddenly stranded, met with an abundance of Turkic bureaucratic indifference with total institutional apathy to get customers home. 

These route maps appear to have preceded that episode, as there is some reporting that the network shifted more recently: Ankara and Kuala Lumpur were intermittently added  while London and the several Ukrainian cities have all been dropped, while the most recent development has been a new service to Jeddah utilizing the carrier's pride-of-fleet B777-200, but this has been delayed under the present circumstances. 

British Caledonian Schedule, 1977

A few pages from the timetable of British Caledonian Airways in 1977, demonstrating the breadth of its reach at the height of its operations, reaching on its own metal to Banjul while codesharing extensively with Air Afrique, Air France, and UTA Overseas French Airlines to Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Bangui, and Baghdad with other connections to Bangkok and Bahrain on other carriers such as Singapore, KLM, Qantas, Gulf Air, and Thai Airways. The flight to Barbados is a rare bit of history: IQ2/IQ4 was a Martinair Holland DC-10 flying for the old Caribbean Airlines. 

Interspersed vintage black-and-white sketches give a flavor of the High Classic Jet Age, while an in-page advert feature's the airlines cargo operations. 

Arrivals at Tirana Mother Teresa Airport, August 2017

All's rather quiet at the main international airport in Albania, Mother Teresa in Tirana, the capital. The mid-afternoon bank of flights is a mix of scheduled flag carriers such as Austrian from Vienna, Air Serbia from Belgrade, and ČSA Czech from Prague, and a smattering of charters from Prague, Venice and Bratislava.

Aviogenex System Route Map, c.1989

An undated route map, found in a dusty display 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; the home hubs had to been repeated at the mouth of the English Channel underneath Ireland to adequately show the web of connections to 16 cities, including  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, and 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.

Arrivals at O.R. Tambo, August 2017

A mid-day Arrivals board for O.R. Tambo from a week or so after the previous posts, showing an all-African schedule at the continent's largest airport. Most are operated by hometown carrier South African Airways, and most flights are from the southern African region; indeed, the schedule represents almost every nation in the SADC league, with Gaborone, Botswana appearing three times, from the first, third, and second-to-last flight. Air Botswana operates that third flight, as well as one before it to remote Francistown.

There are other regional connections from Maseru, in Lesotho, the nation that is famously completely surrounded by South Africa; other nearby capitals of almost every other country that borders South Africa Maputo, Windhoek, Blantyre, and Lusaka flights by SAA, and a rare Air Zimbabwe flight from Harare is unsurprisingly delayed. Further afield, there is the trans-ocean service on Air Mauritius arriving just before noon.  The more distant continental connections are the ubiquitous rivalry of Kenya Airways from Nairobi, Ethiopian from Addis Ababa, and Fastjet from Dar Es Salaam—that low-cost start-up's longest route. 

International Departures from O.R. Tambo Airport, July 2017 (2)

An update of half an hour from the last post: the Asian long-hauls of Emirates and Singapore are delayed, while Qatar Airways is leaving on time for Doha. Ethiopian seems like it may not make it out on schedule, as the gates still open 25 minutes prior to pushback.

Another block of near and far intra-African flights on South African Airways has filled up the 3-4PM block: Maseru, Lesotho; Lagos, Nigeria, Douala, Cameroon, Maputo, Mozambique, Nairobi, Kenya, and Manzini, in Swaziland. After that, an Air Botswana short-hop to Gaborone (see also this post from the previous week). 

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. 

Air Namibia: Windhoek—Gaborone—Durban, August 2017

Staying with Namibia, as from the previous post, here is a floor banner advertisement at the check-in desk of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Gaborone, Botswana, seen in August 2017. Air Namibia is trying to make its lemon into a grapefruit, offering a convenient option connecting their own capital and that of their neighbor with South Africa's tertiary city—what is surely still a thin route. Almost all of Gaborone's air traffic routes through the short hop to the megacity of Johannesburg. 

KLM: New service to Windhoek, October 2016

The recent coverage of KLM's long routes plunging down across the African continent to Johannesburg is relevant to this development from late 2016: the somewhat surprising move by the Dutch Airline to extend its formerly-lucrative Amsterdam—Luanda service to Windhoek, Namibia. Here a travel agency in the center of Nice, France, advertises the news with a plain paper printed notice in the shop window just a few weeks after the public announcement.

The service was celebrated as a major development for the country and an opportunity to boost business and tourism traffic. While it does offer an alternative to the relatively few European connections to the famously sparsely populated country, it presents stiff competition to the struggling national carrier. 

Iberia Network, c.1968

Reminiscent of the mid-century route map of KLM posted earlier this month, this fascinating and somewhat confusing postcard, showing Iberia's entire route system, is dated to 1968 but seems a relic of even earlier years, given its semi-medieval, hand-painted style, especially the Gothic lettering of "Mare Oceanum" set vertically on the spine of the Atlantic Ridge. It is featured for sale at this website.

The anachronism is further enhanced by the curious and highly confusing use of older names for the destinations: Nouadhibou is still shown as Port-Etienne, Dakhla in Western Sahara is referenced as Villa Cisneros, and Malabo, capital of Spain's only sub-Saharan colony, is listed as Santa Isabel, which connected to the metropole of Madrid and the large station at Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, and which has local links to mainland Bata and to Douala, in Cameroon, which is spelled with a "V" as if carved in marble. 

The mysterious is "La Guera" which today can be found almost nowhere on any maps or airline schedules. Friends at Airline Memorabilia note that this was once an outpost in Spanish Sahara, now a ghost town. It is interesting to juxtapose this item with an Iberia route-map advertised twenty years later. 

The barbell-style route system is focused, naturally, on Madrid, with feeder routes to the capitals of Western Europe,  and which appears to have non-stops to Rio de Janeiro; the hub at Tenerife likewise has a non-stop to South America, reaching landfall at Montevideo; the network then extends across the southern cone to Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago and upward to Lima, then Bogotá, then Caracas, where the route turns back to the Iberian peninsula or up to the Caribbean basin at San Juan.

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. 

KLM: The African Routes, 1955

In looking back at the once-prominent role of Kano in trans-Saharan aviation, here we look back at the pre-jet age, when KLM stretched just a few routes across the vast African continent. In this detail from the airline's route map in about 1955, the Amsterdam—Rome—Kano—Brazzaville—Johannesburg spine stretches down the center, a line which was featured far back in the early days of The Timetablist. 

In the east, a bundle of routes pin at Cairo, with a single line appearing to run down to Khartoum. On the left side of the map, red lines bunch at Lisbon, where two split off, one seeming to stop at Sal in Cape Verde before heading to the northern coast of Brazil, while a second hugs the mainland, changing course slightly at Dakar, likely for Rio de Janeiro.

Nigeria Airways, May 1979, 2 of 2: Detail of Domestic Network

A detail of the previous post, shown the domestic network of Nigeria Airways in May 1979; a barbell system with poles at Lagos in the south and Kano in the north. 

Nigeria Airways: The Right Connections for Nigeria and West Africa, May 1979 (1 of 2)

Having now extensively reviewed the myriad airlines of contemporary and recent Nigeria, this New Year's Day we look back almost forty years to the era of the Winged Elephant, when the green-striped jets of Nigeria Airways ruled the skies.

Similar to previous features on The Timetablist, the national carrier was seeking the discerning eye of the Air Transport World reader in May, 1979, boasting of its "luxurious DC10," to "the nerve center of business in Africa," Lagos, but also throughout West Africa, as is helpfully shown in the route map at lower left.

What is today an aviation market arranged around the twin poles of Lagos and Abuja was, before Abuja was realized, organized between the southern hub of Lagos and the northern gateway of Kano, from whence intercontinental flights crossed the Sahara to European metropoles, including Rome and Amsterdam, but likewise eastward to the Middle East; the Kano—Jeddah link was recently revived but in those days the operation had the somewhat unusual final termination point of Karachi. A sort of code share, presumably on Egyptair, linked Cairo—Athens. Note also the cross-border link from Kano to Niamey, Niger. 

There was a second non-stop to London from Lagos, but mostly this was the start of the coastal routes along West Africa's edge, Cotonou—Lomé—Accra—Abidjan—Monrovia, where the widebody headed nonstop for New York JFK, while the smaller elements of the fleet linked Freetown—Banjul—Dakar and back in a minihub. There was a nonstop from Lagos to Douala, and also a connection to southeastern Calabar, as well as flights to Libreville and Nairobi. 

Chanchangi Route Map, c.2010

This item from the dusty archives of The Timetablist's dusty archives is an undated relic of the low-graphic era of a decade ago, when Chanchangi Air Lines was a means of travel within Nigeria. The 8-bit emblem of the airline and the card-deck zoom-in of the map of Nigeria further limit the sophistication of the visual message. 

Unlike the previous post, Yola was not served, but Port Harcourt and Kaduna apparently were, including an especially short hop between Abuja and Kaduna. 

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: New Service from Lagos to Dakar and Monrovia, December 2017

As much as Med-View has intercontinental ambitions, in presuming the mantle of "the Airline of Nigeria," it was taken on a network and route strategy very similar to previous air carriers from Nigeria such as Arik, going all the way back to the original Nigeria Airways.

As recently shown in these social media posts, Med-View has launched services along the West African coast, from Lagos to Monrovia (via Accra, of course), which is shown here in a gloomy, off-centered image of the city's squat legislative building; and all the way up to Dakar, where a gorgeous photo of Gorée Island references DKR, the old Yoff airport, which closed this same month. All flights to the Senegalese capital have since shifted to the brand-new Blaise Diagne International in distant Diass.

Med-View Airline: Lagos to Dubai, November 2017

At the same time Kano—Jeddah flights were launched, another destination that Med-View Airline has successfully reached is Dubai, one of the golden jewels of prestige destinations for African airlines. However, more recently Med-View has mysteriously announced a temporary suspension of the service. 

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.