Flightradar24 Thread Part III

Looks like a number of IST flights are diverting to Antalya, but that may well be down to nothing more sinister than a lack of ramp space at IST to accept them, due to the cancellation of departures, there is a very real space issue at IST overnight under normal circumstances, and with the situation tonight, I suspect there's no spaces left for even small aircraft, let alone the wide body traffic. At least 6 maybe more WB's appear to be heading for Antalya at the moment.

Turkish airlines are very much in the air again, given the manner and severity of the disruption to their operation, I have to admit to a sneaking admiration for how fast they've managed to get things moving again. They had huge numbers of out of place aircraft and crews overnight. quite a few long haul aircraft ended up in Antalya rather than Istanbul, probably for space reasons on the ground, let alone the disruption caused by the coup/political situation.
I did a couple of trips to Istanbul last year, and the airline is indeed impressive, though Istanbul airport would not be my favourite place to be using on a regular basis, the queues for passport control are horrendous, even late in the evening, but that's the price you pay for going through a busy airport, there's a lull in flights for about 4 hours in the early hours of the morning, but the rest of the day, it's constant on 2 runways, with nothing smaller than a 737 or A320 getting near the place, and a high proportion of wide body aircraft operating there.

In reality, while the last 24 hours will not have been good for them, ( or good for Turkey, but that's a discussion for a different forum) the disruption would have been equally bad had there been a major incident or accident on one of the 2 runways, the volume of traffic there is such that there is no way there would not be massive disruption if one runway was closed for any length of time.

I'm sure there will be short term problems with people choosing to go through other hubs, rather than Turkey, but memories tend to be short, especially when things are price sensitive. Time will tell, but I wouldn't be writing Turkish Airlines off just yet, unless things don't settle down quickly on the political side of things.