45 hours to move operations from Ataturk airport to Istanbul’s new airport

The last commercial passenger flight took off from Istanbul’s Ataturk airport on Saturday and convoys of trucks ferried thousands of tonnes of equipment across the city to a giant new airport which Turkey plans to make the biggest in the world.

Reuters reports that the “mammoth transfer between the two hubs, described by Turkish authorities as unprecedented in scale and speed, was already largely complete a little more than 24 hours after it began before dawn on Friday.”

Ataturk Airport has been the hub and home for the carrier during the last 86 years, Turkish Airlines said in a written statement. TRT reports that the last passenger flight was scheduled to Singapore at 0500 GMT, it said. “The flag carrier’s TK54 Istanbul – Singapore flight has already become a memorable milestone in the history of Turkish Airlines,” it added.

The Guardian says that planners are calling this weekend move “the Big Bang”: a total of 10,000 pieces of equipment, from planes to huge aircraft-towing vehicles to fragile security sensors, will be moved from Atatürk to the new airport’s location, 30km north on the Black Sea. In just two days’ time, all Turkish Airlines flights will be expected to arrive and depart from the new site.

The new Istanbul Airport, costing some $8 billion and one of several mega-projects championed by President Tayyip Erdogan, will initially be able to handle 90 million passengers a year, close to the world’s largest existing airport capacity.

Via The Guardian, TRT, Reuters

Photo: A Turkish airlines plane takes off from the new Istanbul Airport in Istanbul, Turkey, 06 April 2019. Ataturk airport operations officially moved to the new Istanbul Airport on 05 April 2019. Moving took about 45 hours, with over 700 trucks involved. EPA-EFE/ERDEM SAHIN