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Historical Travels: Airline Timetables

Reconstructing journeys from the past

Airline Timetables

Photograph of staff Unloading baggage for inspection after arrival of plane from Mexico. Glendale Airport, California NYPL Digital Collections IMAGE ID 57591832

Airline timetables are useful to better understand how travelers would have traveled, both past and present. These timetables can help answer questions like: 

  • How long would the flight have taken?
  • What flights are one-way? What flights require transfers? 
  • What airline companies utilize which routes?
  • What airline companies no longer exist? Which ones still exist?

Please see below, for examples of airline tables that can be useful to your research. Make sure to review newspapers, guidebooks, and city directories to find these timetables.

 

Unloading baggage for inspection after arrival of plane from Mexico. Glendale Airport, California NYPL Digital Collections IMAGE ID 57591832

Catalog Tips

When searching for airline timetables in our Online Research Catalog, we recommend the following keyword or subject search. Please note that you will find more results if you do not include the area of interest, when doing your search: 

A similar keyword search can be utilized in other digital repositories, such as Hathi Trust.

As noted above, timetables are also often time found within periodicals. As such, check out our Timetables main tab, to see how you can locate digitized periodicals through New York Public Library's databases.

A Selection of Airline Timetables