Let’s stir up controversy with some airline route maps.
JetBlue is in the news for having displayed Palestinian Territories on its in-flight map. I don’t care. What I do care about is a plane landing safely at its intended destination.
But wait, maybe I do care … such stories make for great rabble-rousing here.
To wit, if all airline route maps mimicked that of Oman Air, I’d have nothing to ramble on about:
With any luck, this will be a post that I will continually update. That’s especially true once I’m able to find the Delta inflight magazine that showed Kampuchea instead of Cambodia, or the one where Xi’an, China is listed as the more archaic Chang’an. Until those fateful findings happen, I’ve got a bunch of other maps to rile up your jingoism.
On this years-old China Southern route map, the red lines stand for code-share flights, those being flights operated by China Southern’s partners (at the time, Delta). Oh, and Minneapolis relocates to Canada, southern Florida travels back to 2003, and New Zealand was set adrift in an historical direction.
Etihad of the United Arab Emirates went a bit overboard. I was flying from Abu Dhabi to Jakarta, but they generously wanted to impress me with their knowledge of world geography. Because what’s going on in Brasilia is going to affect my flight over the Bay of Bengal.
Good thing they don’t have any domestic routes.
If you squint well enough, you can see…the ocean. This one was from a China Airlines Taipei-Honolulu trip.
Two for the price of one.
The West Sea is what the Korean Peninsula terms the Yellow Sea, nothing too bellicose. But the East Sea. Well, in another never-ending spat with Japan, the Koreas can’t possibly agree with the Sea of Japan, so they just used a modicum of imagination. By the way, the Sea of Japan has some delicious Echizen crab….
This Aeromexico route map requires more of a sleuth out of us.
Zoom into Connecticut and Illinois. Connecticut’s “Bradley” makes sense, as the busiest airport in the state is called Hartford Bradley (BDL). But Bradley, Illinois? There is a town by that name, and it is near Greater Kankakee Airport, but that one lacks commercial service.
Nothing much add to here, just that Thai Airways long extinct LAX-BKK flight is the longest (by distance) that I’ve taken.
Bonus
Here’s a lagniappe from 2005, when I flew a Northwest 747-400 from Hong Kong HKG to Tokyo NRT:
What are some unusual places/things you’ve noticed on airline route maps?
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