In the 100 year anniversary of British Airways I am taking a little look back at some of the routes that BA once operated, as well as comparing them to those which they fly now. So in order to do this I have managed to find a copy of British Airways route network from 1975, one year after the merger between BEA and BOAC, which if you want to see can be found at this link here:
In comparison to this the modern day British Airways network looks like this.
Whilst these are both similar networks at their cores, there are a few significant changes that have happened over the years. Initially I feel it is impossible to ignore the change in domestic destinations that British Airways serves. Historically it included 29 separate destinations, including a large number within Scotland. Now this number has almost decreased by 2 thirds down to ten. For most of these it simply comes down to the fact that London's airports are now highly congested with both Gatwick and Heathrow almost at capacity, meaning British Airways no longer can afford to operate these routes at the expense of other more valuable long haul routes. However others are less surprising that they have been dropped - can you imagine the modern British Airways operating a service from Penzance to the Isles of Scily.
Next looking across to Europe it appears that the majority of the destinations served in 1975 with only the exceptions of Bremmen, Sylt, Cork and Shannon, are all still served by British Airways. Equally as impressive I would say is that when comparing it to the modern day map it does not appear that that many new routes have been added to the British Airways network since then apart from a rather large amount of flights to some of the Greek islands and the Canaries.
Similar things can be said about the middle east where 3 of the 4 destinations that have been dropped since 1975; Daghdad, Damascus and Tehran, have been dropped quite justifiably due to instability in the region whilst meanwhile it appears that no additional destinations have been added.
Flights to Africa have also drastically changed. While the number of destinations has remained relatively constant, there has been a change in the focus as flights to eastern Africa have reduced drastically while destinations in western Africa have been introduced as well as destinations in South Africa tripling.
As for the rest of Asia some pretty major changes have occurred. Colombo, Dacca, Karachi, Brunei and Burma have all been dropped whilst some newer routes have come in such as Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul. Interestingly for me too is the fact that Osaka also appears on this route map despite it only being reintroduced as a destination by British Airways from earlier this year. Oceania also has taken a large hit with only 1 of the original 5 destinations in this region continuing to be flown to by British Airways.
Looking across to North America only one destination has been dropped, Anchorge, with this being very likely being due to its use with flights to Asia being restricted by range of aircraft. However in the rest of North America BA has had an absolute explosion with the amount of destinations served increasing from 11 up to 32 now with this number likely to continue increasing.
However the rest of the Americas hasn't fared quite as well, with 5 central American destinations being dropped with 16 central American and Caribbean destinations now being served which is up from the 14 back in 1975. However what has also increased in amount is the flights to South America with 4 destinations now being served in Brazil, Chile and Argentina.
What surprised me most by looking at this map however was how little relatively BA had changed in the 40 years since they were flying these routes. Whilst new routes and destinations have been added it was surprising to see how few outside of the United Kingdom had actually been dropped.
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