Swiss air transport services were suspended with effect from 28 August 1939. The opening of the Locarno – Rome service on 18 March 1940 (see previous post) marked their resumption. It was a non-stop service, daily except Sundays, taking about two and a half hours. Swissair had not flown this route prior to WWII. Italy did not enter the war until June 1940 (at least, it was a non-belligerent), so this was technically a service to another neutral country.

Around the time that the Rome service started, Swissair was contemplating another passenger route, namely Locarno – Barcelona. This was also a new route for the airline and a service to another neutral country. It started on 1 April 1940, on a daily basis. At that time, Vichy France was not established; the partition of France began in June 1940. Even after this date, Swissair’s route would surely have been across the ‘free zone’, so I assume it continued.

A third route was also under consideration, namely the re-introduction of the pre-war freight and mail service from Altenrhein on Lake Constance to Munich. The German authorities had given their approval.

The timetable of the Swedish airline ABA effective from April 1942 took the form of a route map with the route/flight numbers printed along the lines connecting the various cities. The thick lines showed ABA’s own services and the thin lines the connecting services, many of which, not unexpectedly, were via Berlin. One of these was the previously mentioned ‘K22’ to Lisbon.

The frequency of the ABA/Scandinavian services were shown by a letter against the route/service number: ‘V’ = ‘only on weekdays’ and D = ‘weekdays and Sundays’

For the routes within Scandinavia, the times of those flights were shown inside the circles containing the city names. There were also times outside the circle preceded by the letter ‘Z’. While there appears to be no explanation, they were between 45 minutes and 60 minutes ahead of flight times, so might just have been the times of bus services out to the airports to catch particular flights.

Apart from the Lufthansa ‘K22’ service to Lisbon, there was one other service for which the route/flight number was preceded by a letter, namely Route ‘F1’ between Copenhagen and Hamburg. In this case, the ‘F’ stood for a freight and mail service only.

Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of the ABA service to Britain (Route 1630). After test/proving flights earlier in the year, the service started on 5 May 1942 – outbound on a Tuesday and inbound on a Thursday. From the 10th flight onwards, the aircraft would stop at a military base, Satenas, on the outbound flight; this was more convenient for the SKF (ball bearing) factory and also made actual departure times less obvious to the Germans. The aircraft used was SE-BAG, the ex-Swissair DC-3, which had more powerful engines allowing it to fly higher (less risk from AA fire).

During the early summer of 1942, the service was so regular that it was almost like peacetime. However, on the night of 21-22 June 1942, returning from Scotland, SE-BAG was attacked over the Skagerrak. Though badly damaged, it was able to make it back to Stockholm. The service did not restart until 14 August 1942, using the re-engined SE-BAF. SE-BAG resumed its duties on 6 October 1942.

Here’s ABA’s 1942 route map/timetable:

This will probably be the last extract from the Summer 1939 LARES timetable – not bang on topic but we did discuss FW200 Condors earlier in this thread, as I recall, and the FW company placed the advert below (in case you’re wondering the LARES timetable was in French):

This is a follow up to Post # 258, the one with the Lufthansa route map for the summer 1941. This post is off-topic but may be of more general interest.

If you look at the eastern side of the Lufthansa route map, you will see that two Romanian cities, Sibiu and Braşov, also have German-sounding names (Hermannstadt and Kronstadt respectively). Sibiu was the main city of the “Seibenburgen”, the seven fortified towns associated with the Saxons who were invited to settle in this area back in the 12th and 13th centuries. In consequence, the architecture in the old town centre is reminiscent of parts of Germany and there are still German connections in the region to this day. Sibiu once had a predominantly German-speaking population but they are now but a small minority. Nevertheless, the current President of Romania (Klaus Johannis) was a former mayor of Sibiu and comes from this German minority.

Getting back to the 1941 Lufthansa route map, when you look in the timetable section for details of the air services from Sibiu and Braşov, you are referred to Hermannstadt and Kronstadt. Moreover, LARES, the Romanian airline, had included neither on their own route network immediately prior to WWII. So, either the German powers-that-be sought their inclusion or LARES saw the way the wind was blowing and began to fly there.