This week’s featured link:
Watch the new Big Metal Bird: Island Hopper – United Hub
This one has always been on the bucket list – flying the famed island hopper that goes between Guam and Honolulu. This video gives a good high-level overview of what’s involved in that flying. Maybe one of these days I’ll do a much more in-depth report on it myself.
Two for the road:
Continental Washington Dulles diagram, 1987 – Airline Maps
There is something transfixing about this blog and its simple premise. It just shows old airline maps whether airports, route maps, or anything else of interest. I spend more time looking at these posts than I should, I admit, and I love it. This particular post is like hopping in the wayback machine at Dulles. It also shows how little has changed for United at that place. But hey, at least I know where the barber shop was.
This Time in Our History: Operation Pineapple Tops – Mana’o
Hawaiian’s blog gives a brief glimpse back at something that seems goofy today. The airline was tasked with flying 4 million pineapple crowns from Maui and Moloka’i over to Hawai’i Island. Today, very little pineapple is grown at all there since it’s cheaper to grow in other countries.
Bret, wow! That airline map blog is like crack. I don’t think I will get any work done in the office today.
Seriously…what a rabbit hole I just went into! Awesome!
If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, visit departedflights.com. It has old schedules, seat maps, terminal maps, route maps, and marketing pieces back to the 60’s.
Absolutely. Departed Flights also has charts of flights and destinations from old hub airports. You could spend hours on that site.
I would really like to see an article about United’s Guam hub sometime!
The consensus in Guam is that Chicago has no idea what’s going on out there. I got that first hand last time I was there. I believe it. The Guam hub is a little boring. Everything takes off early in the AM and then nothing happens for hours and then planes trickle in and out during the day before loading up for one last blast in the evening.
Back in the Continental/Air Micronesia days, Guam was a real hub. But after the merger, United has slowly been abandoning Guam: fewer destinations & destinations, closed the call center and city office, and otherwise downgraded.
Love the Dulles airport map, especially how the rotunda is featured on it. That waste of space is much more of a headache these days. Despite the downtrodden C/D concourse, I will admit I am one of the bigger IAD defenders out there. It’s nice to see the airport is staging a bit of a comeback these days!