Alitalia '76 Vs ITA Airways '26, how the flag carrier's network has changed in 50 years

It is the mid-1970s. The three Gulf biggies are still far from stretching their hands on traffic between Europe, Asia and Oceania. In the Far East, today's giants like Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines are little more than regional companies.

In Africa, Ethiopian Airlines is a company that still flies DC-3s. E in Europe Turkish Airlines is a small carrier known for its old planes And delayed flights.

In the skies of the world, British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa, KLM and... Alitalia dominate.

Which in those days is a true giant of the skies, a global company in its own right, whose planes fly to all six continents, including Oceania. And you can't help but feel nostalgic, thinking about the way that market dominance and reputation were thrown to the wind, to the point of the company's closure five years ago.

Without internet and chat-gpt, companies regularly published their schedules And from the archive of the "dad" of the Barbone A couple of Flytime issues have come out.

Maps of the then-flag carrier's network literally leave you speechless not only For the number of destinations served on long haul., but also For the exoticness of some of them, although the first thing that jumps to the eye (and which at the time lumped Alitalia in with all the other major world airlines). Is the number of stopovers his flights made to reach distant destinations, along routes that are strictly flown non-stop today.

But it should be remembered that there were no Boeing 787s, 777s or Airbus A350s back then., which are able to safely fly nonstop for 15+ hours. Instead, there were the Boeing 747 and the Douglas DC-10, which barely reached 12-13 hours, in addition to the DC-8s That did not go beyond 9-10 hours.

In short, to put it nicely, the 'Barbone' Matteo Rainisio to do his 'new year's world tour' it would not have taken the 43 hours taken between last December 29 and 31, but four or five days....

In addition to that, it should be considered that passenger traffic, especially long-haul, was a fraction of what it is today, reason why carriers were trying to 'pick up' passengers by putting multiple destinations along the way to a flight's final destination.

So, for example, to Brazil one would fly with a stopover in Dakar, Senegal. To Johannesburg by stopping over in Kinshasa, Zaire, or Nairobi, Kenya. Mauritius, to which ITA Airways today has a direct A330-900 flight from Rome, was reached with two stopovers, which could be Addis Ababa and Mogadishu or Khartoum and Mogadishu.

But the real 'odyssey' was to go to Tokyo or Australia. On the way to the Japanese capital was being done stop first in Athens, then in Bombay (it was called that back then) or Delhi, then Bangkok, and finally Hong Kong to a total of four stopovers (Imagine the total time of the entire journey, which ITA now covers non-stop with an A350-900 taking 12 or 13 hours, depending on whether the flight is eastbound or westbound.)

For Australia, however, the intermediate stops were Athens (or Tel Aviv), Mumbai and Singapore, before arriving in Sydney and continuing on to Melbourne.

The frequency of flights was certainly not what it is today: to Japan there was only one flight per week, to Brazil and Argentina three per week, although to Australia, where a large Italian community with still strong and recent ties to the motherland resided, there were as many as five connections per week. Only on New York did Alitalia operate daily.

Interestingly, the North American network of those years was really tiny, even comparing it to ITA's certainly not huge one, with only Montreal, Toronto, New York and Philadelphia (via Boston) connected to both Rome and Milan.

But the reason lies in the fact that the Atlantic, in those days, was the unchallenged domain of two American companies now gone: the legendary Pan Am and TWA, against whom it was arduous to measure oneself.

Returning to the network, two things are striking: the number of destinations served and the extreme 'exoticness' of some. As for destinations, there were 5 in North America, 4 in South America, 20 in Africa, 9 in the Middle East, 6 in Asia, and 2 in Oceania, for a total of 47. Today, ITA's long-haul network has less than half of them.

Also, Among these 47 were some really crazy ones, unthinkable today for a variety of reasons: from Italy, with our national carrier, one could then fly to places such as Baghdad, Khartoum, Mogadishu, Dar Es Salaam, Antananarivo, Luanda, Kinshasa.

The company's motto at that time, translated into English, was. 'We'll show the world. And it was absolutely true.