Originally Posted by bealine
While we're on the subject, is there a "Global Air Timetable" on the web that features all IATA airlines and isn't biased to one of the Alliances! (When I worked for Thomas Cook, pre-computer age, we used to have massive tomes from which the travel clerk could work out absolutely any worldwide routing!)
It's just that we fancy visiting some of the more obscure Pacific islands to celebrate or Silver Wedding later this year (bloody hell, married 25 years and my hair isn't even grey yet!) and it is very difficult to find out who flies there, how often and from/to which main airports!
Bealine, what you are looking for is a sad omission nowadays from the information age, there are many of us who have written about this on FT in the past.
Nearest was a product called "Electronic Travel Desk" by a company called Goldenware Software. There were versions of this used by all three of the major alliances, which is the much-missed product referred to above, but Goldenware also did an all-embracing version of their own, which contained not only the alliances but also everyone else who used the industry standard method of timetable reporting. So it had Ryanair, all the main Russian domestic carriers, your South Pacific flights, pretty much the lot. And you could see the complete timetable of all services out of any airport.
Goldenware were outsold to the alliances by a range of poxy steps backwards steps that many found annoying, and their product has been lost. OAG have all the data inside but are unable to offer an adequate way of getting it out (they remind me of the way Encyclopedia Britannica went, all marketing blah, nothing spent developing the product).
What the software producers seem unable to understand is that a timetable should show the complete catalogue of services if the user wishes to see them. All the products seem to have gone the way of "give me one origin, give me one destination, give me one day of travel". Then they show you the limited number of flights for that. It happens because they get based on reservation systems. Quite how you get to know what you can ask for in the first place has evaded them. The Nonrev timetable linked to above is a typical example of this, most airline sites go even tighter down to only their own flights.
For example from my local airport London City it is good to see what is available. Routes come, routes go, some are once a week, some are many times a day, and I am quite capable of interpreting a listing of them all and working out my best travel options. It's all disappointing because you know the data is all there in the database, it just needs a sensible way of getting it out.