Turkish Airlines started growing again

It has not been too long that Turkish Airlines had very difficult times economically and had to ground some single-aisle and wide body aircrafts in Turkey due to many difficult times such as terror attacks, coup attempt, issues on Syria border etc.

These all came just after the Airlines decided to invest heavily for future and making many wide body orders to both Boeing and Airbus.

According to Times Magazine, “when Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport was struck by bombers in June, even transit passengers started to avoid the country. The result was that 9m fewer people travelled with Turkish in 2016 than was originally expected, dragging the flag-carrier to its first annual loss in recent memory”.

The airline management had many actions to at least postpone the crisis. First of all they postponed some orders and changed some Boeing 777 passenger aircrafts to cargo aircrafts. Consequently and luckily the cargo fleet has been working very effectively and helping the income statements.

At the end of 2017, carried passenger numbers reached the double-digit growth again. 

 The Chairman of Turkish Airlines explained the trigger behind the growth as follows: shifting capacity from weaker to stronger markets—and camaraderie among the workforce. He remind that how one trade union tore up an offer of 4% wage increases, insisting that 2.5% would be adequate. “The amount  is not big, but the motivation and the emotion is amazing, All around the world, unions are requesting more. Our employees stand behind their airline.”

When the financial results are published by the Airline, we will go into details how profitable 2017 was and will be more able to comment on this. Per the first lights, it seems that the Airline management has been recovering.