Originally Posted by
Seat 2A
12. (1992) You would have thought that flying from Zurich to Freetown, Sierra Leone would have involved a widebodied aircraft at some point in the journey, but surprisingly, the itinerary your company travel department has booked for you involves two nonstop flights aboard two airlines, each employing narrow bodied aircraft of the same model and variant. Identify both airlines, the two aircraft specific to variant and the route to be flown.
jrl767:
I have to believe that the connection point was in Africa rather than Europe; that said, any service from Europe to sub-Saharan destinations in the interior would have almost certainly been on UTA from Paris/CDG, which would seem to leave African points along the coast -- east to west: Lagos/LOS, Accra/ACC, Abidjan/ABJ, Monrovia/ROB, Conakry/CKY, and Dakar/DKR. A narrow-body from ZRH would have been a Swissair DC-8-60
LOS is most likely out because Nigeria Airways was a 707 operator, I don't like ACC for the distance from FNA, and I think both DKR and ROB saw enough traffic to warrant wide-body flights ... so my first guess is a connection at ABJ to UTA
An excellent and well thought out guess, but no - unfortunately you're a bit off here. Swissair was indeed the first carrier out of Zurich, but the aircraft was not a DC-8 of any variant. Neither UTA nor ABJ are involved in this routing. That said, knowing what you now know should prove to be most instructive.
12- SR was a longtime Douglas customer before switching over to Airbus in the mid 90s, so we're looking at something in the DC9 family in 1992 ... gotta vote for the M80 as the smaller jets weren't a common sight in Africa
not sure if they served FNA from their hub, but Iberia over Madrid/MAD would certainly be possible