A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away airlines printed and distributed paper timetables. Travel agents, frequent flyers and people who needed to take a plane somewhere referred to them to find out airline schedules.
The Internet came along, and eventually the paper timetables became PDF files online, before being dropped altogether. Nowadays we refer to an airline’s website to search for flights, but it’s perhaps not as fun as the past.
What Did Timetables Look Like?
British Airways still have their final PDF timetable online for the Winter season 28 October 2007 to 29 March 2008. The only way it differs from the printed ones is that it doesn’t include all the aircraft seating plans in the back (which was actually my favourite part, but today we arguably have it better with aeroLOPA).
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- An excerpt from the last BA PDF timetable.
Back in the day it was fun to have timetables from large airlines like BA. There were so many different places you could go, so it was definitely food for the imagination reading all the different cities. I’d go so far as to say it was a bit more romantic than things are today.
A Current British Airways Timetable
Speedbird Online has current BA timetables on their website, in the same format as the PDF and printed versions from times past. This discovery has made a certain cohort of frequent flyers quite happy.
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- Looks familiar, doesn’t it?
One of the limitations of airline websites is that it’s not really possible to easily flip through the various destinations. When you’re looking for inspiration, it takes much more effort than having an entire schedule at your fingertips, so this format is actually rather simpler all round.
Overall Thoughts
It’s fantastic to see this schedule online at Speedbird Online. One caveat is that you should not rely totally on the data, because things change very quickly in the airline world. If you’re planning to use it before booking flights, you will be smart to check the British Airways website to ensure the service you want is operating.
Surely it would not take much effort for an airline to have something like this available all the time, in this format, that updates automatically. The fact airlines have largely removed route maps is another bug bear of mine, because they were also really quite handy to look at for inspiration.
What do you think of airline timetables? Do you miss having them available or is it no big deal? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Rafael Luiz Canossa via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve always loved airline timetables from a young age leafing through the Pan Am timetable and dreaming!
I remember calling Pan Am in 1990 and asking for a timetable and they posted it to me. It was not a big one at all, as the airline was nearly gone by that stage. I might still have it somewhere actually! I can only imagine what their timetables were like back in the 1960s!
I would love to see a return of airline timetables. Even with the caveat of checking the airline website to make sure flights of interest are still operating, it would save me a lot of time and effort when I am trying to figure out viable routes, sequencing, and timing for multi-stop working trips.
Yes, you’d think it wouldn’t be too difficult to do something up online. Well, maybe one day we will see something like that again.
Some of them had flight itineraries that was also fascinating as some had exact flight/layover times for all the cities covered by each flight.
Oh I’ve seen a couple of those before. I’d say today it would be something you’d see on that United Airlines flight, the island hopper, across the Pacific that they inherited from Continental.
In the 1980s, even as a travel agent, I would go on weekends to the East Side Airlines terminal near Grand Central Station in NYC and collect all the different timetables. (each airline had a counter). Ah, the past!
That would have been really great, being in New York back then. Virtually anybody who was anybody flew there, so you would have had plenty of choice.
I collected them from around the mid 80s until they quit publishing them. I probably have a few hundred of them still. My intention was to sell them someday. I used to live close to Dulles Airport in the 90s and 00s and picked up most of them from there, including British. BTW, I don’t have one with me, but I thought that BA did include a seating chart in their timetable. I know that Lufthansa did.
BA definitely had seating charts in the back of their timetable. Concorde particularly stood out with the wings. Great that you have so many still – I’d say they’re fairly valuable these days. Very nice!