The Zen of Airline Route Maps

Wow Patrick, you brought back some great memories. In the 70s and 80s I was shuttleing back and forth from Washington DC to the Pacific Northwest. I enjoyed Northwest's six or seven stop 727 flight to Seattle. The stop in Minneapolis provided a chance to visit a free paperback book exchange.

Southwest has been doing this the whole time.

Beautiful evocative maps. Makes me want to get a fedora and fly from London to Sydney on BOAC

Going through my mom's steamer trunks from her late 1940's WAC assignment to the US WWII occupation in Germany, I found two complete airline "wallets" for her trips from the US. They included the original tickets, route maps, travel hints, things to do in Europe, luggage tags, and everything else the airlines, TWA and American Overseas Airlines (now just American Airlines), gave to a passenger flying from the western US to Germany. I also found a letter from her to her mom saying if her father took a bad health turn, he died in 1949, send her a telegram and she could be home from Germany to Phoenix in 36 hours. Not really too bad even by today's standards.

My first commercial flight was in 1950 on a snowbird trip from ROC to TPA with stops in PIT, BWI, and ATL aboard a DC3. I was 10 and still in my snowsuit at the door. They opened the door and I was greeted with the smell of orange blossoms and 80° breezes. Magical. Almost worth the 10 hours of air sickness.

KLM had two flights with stopovers before this shutdown that I know of. One was from Amsterdam to Kilimanjaro and on to Dar es Salaam, return straight to Amsterdam, the other was Amsterdam-Luanda-Windhoek. I wonder if this will still be done when the shutdown is over.