Turkish Airlines

From Freepedia

Turkish Airlines (Turkish Türk Hava Yolları) (THY) is an airline based in Istanbul, Turkey. It is the national airline of Turkey and operates a network of scheduled services to Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, North Africa, South Africa and the USA. Its main base is Ataturk International Airport (IST), Istanbul, with a hub at Esenboga International Airport (ESB), Ankara.

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1 Code Data
2 History
3 Services
4 Major Incidents and Accidents
5 Fleet
6 External links

Code Data

IATA Code: TK
ICAO Code: THY
Callsign: Turkish

History

The airline was established on May 20, 1933 as the State Airlines Administration and started operations in August 1933. It was founded in Ankara as Hava Yollari Devlet Isletmesi Idaresi and began operations with an Istanbul, Eskisehir, Ankara service. The name was changed to Devlet Hava Yollari (DHY) in June 1938. The first international flight was launched in 1947 to Athens, but it took another 40 years before the introduction of long-haul flights to the Far East and across the Atlantic. A major reorganisation resulted in the replacement of state company DHY with a mixed corporation, Turk Hava Yollari AO (THY) on 20 February 1956. The airline's shares were passed to the prime ministry public participation administration in 1990 and about 24.8% of the shares were sold to the public. The airline is owned by TC Privatisation Administration (75.2%) and private shareholders (24.8%). The airline has 10,956 employees. It also has a 50% holding in subsidiary airline SunExpress.

Services

Main article: Turkish Airlines destinations

Major Incidents and Accidents

Turkish Airlines is known as a rather safe airliner. During its 72 year history, Turkish Airlines had only one accident on its international flights, and a few on the domestic. The most remarkable being the Turkish Airlines Flight 981, that crashed in France on 3 March 1974 due to explosive decompression, killing all 346 passengers aboard. Before the Tenerife Airport Disaster, it was the worst aircraft disaster.

Fleet

The Turkish Airlines fleet consists of 80 aircraft of following types as of September 2005:

# of aircraft	Aircraft type	Passenger capacity	Max passenger range (km)
7	Airbus A340-311/313	271	11,952
7	Airbus A321-111/231/211	155 / 186 / 195 / 202	2,250 / 3,200
12	Airbus A320-214/232	150 / 156 / 167 / 168	3,350
5	Airbus A310-304	208 / 210	8,100 / 8,980
26	Boeing 737-800	165	4,755
17	Boeing 737-400	148 / 150 / 152	3,350
6	BAE Avro RJ100 ER	99	2,259