Turkey’s ambitious airline seeks to weather 2016 turbulence

Even by the fraught standards of global aviation, 2016 has been tough for Turkish Airlines. In June, its main hub Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul was hit by suicide bomb attacks blamed on jihadists, and then on July 15 putschists seeking to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to take control of Ataturk. Both incidents caused the temporary closure of Turkey’s biggest airport, but the airline managed to resume flights the subsequent day, in a crucial message of business as usual and a symbol of Turkish Airlines’ importance for the country’s image and economy. Yet while Turkish Airlines proudly boasts of its resilience in the face of the repeated attacks and the coup bid, Turkey’s traumatic 2016 has taken its toll on the group and its ambitions. After years where it was one of the few global airlines to reliably make profits, it recorded a $647m loss in H1 to June, even before the effects of the coup are taken into account. Meanwhile, brakes have been slammed on its exponential growth, which has seen the ambitious carrier move from being a low-scale outfit taking just 10.3m passengers in 2002 to 61.2m in 2015. Growth this year has been far slower and the company expects to take a total of 63.4m passengers in 2016, with most of that increase coming in domestic flights. “In the last decade Turkish Airlines was one of the most profitable airlines in the world,” company chairman Ilker Ayci said Thursday. “Turkish Airlines will continue to be an engine of growth,” he vowed. “But this year is a hiccup, a very challenging year.”<br/>