Today, like most days, Singapore Airlines will fly its 140+ strong fleet of passenger aircraft on over 300 flights across the world, connecting over 70 destinations, with services lasting as little as 1 hour right up to 19 hours, but 50 years ago in 1976 it was a different story altogether. Back then only 21 aircraft plied a network of 28 cities – but it was still an impressive operation for an airline in relative infancy, having split from Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA) just over three years earlier. Airline Timetable Images kindly hosts a scanned copy of the Singapore Airlines passenger and freighter timetable from summer 1976, which came into effect almost exactly 50 years ago, making this a good time to reflect on an interesting chapter in the carrier’s great history. The fleet in 1976 Four years after splitting from MSA, the Singapore Airlines as we know it today was still in its relative infancy, during the May – October 1976 summer season. At the time the airline operated an all-Boeing fleet totalling just 21 aircraft. That comprised 11 Boeing 707s, five Boeing 737s and five Boeing 747s. Singapore Airlines Fleet (1976) Aircraft Type In Fleet Routes Boeing 707-320B 3 Australia / NZ, North Asia, SE Asia, India, Middle East, Europe Boeing 707-320C 8 Boeing 737-100 5 Regional (Bangkok, Brunei, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Medan) Boeing 747-200 5 Australia, North Asia, SE Asia, India, Middle East, Europe Total 21 The timetable in 1976 Printed airline timetables were common across the world right up until the early 2000s, but soon stopped being produced by most airlines as the internet and mobile apps replaced any necessity for these. Some airlines like Japan Airlines and ANA still produce PDF timetables for you to download from their websites, while Delta only recently ended the practice, but most – including SIA – no longer bother. The particular timetable we’re studying here is the slimline edition for the summer 1976 season from 1st May 1976 to 31st October 1976. Back then, the network spanned 28 destinations across 23 countries, with cities from London through to Auckland on the roster, however US services (with passenger aircraft at least) were still three years away. Click to enlarge Back then these resembled railway timetables more than the airline schedules you see today, with each route or series of routes shown in a directional sense with the flights in columns and the stops / times in rows. A completely separate table showed the timings on the same routes in the opposite direction. This was a fairly logical way to display the schedules in 1976, when the same aircraft typically made several stops on its journey from origin to ultimate destination – much less common today with the vast majority of Singapore Airlines flights flying simple point-to-point services. Click to enlarge If you wanted to fly from Singapore to London for example, the easiest way to check your options with SIA was to find the flights that ended up there (from the last row of the timetable above, you can see there were seven each week). They all departed from Singapore at 8.30pm each evening but with different flight numbers and usually a slightly different routing each day. Fun fact: Your best bet for getting some sleep on a Singapore – London flight in 1976 was probably to take one of the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or Sunday flights that went via Bangkok then took a long 6.5-hour overnight non-stop leg to Bahrain (yes, 6.5 hours was long in those days!). Monday and Saturday departures meant taking in an extra stop in