16 July 2010 / TODAY’S ZAMAN, İSTANBUL
Turkish Airlines (THY), Turkey’s national flag carrier, posted a 19.3 percent increase in passenger numbers in the January-June period over the same period of last year.
In a written statement to the Public Disclosure Platform (KAP) on Thursday, THY said they served 13.4 million passengers in the first six months of 2010. During the same period, passengers flying business class to international destinations increased by 35 percent, and flights arriving from and departing to cities outside Turkey increased by 25.6 percent. Occupancy rates also rose by 3.9 percentage points to 72.1 percent in the first six months of the year. The available seat kilometers (ASK), a measure of an airline’s passenger-carrying capacity, grew by 19.9 percent, from 25.3 billion to 30.4 billion. The number of flights increased by 16.5 percent to 114,370 in the January-June period over that of a year ago, and the amount of freight carried also increased by 49.6 percent, reaching 151,791 tons in comparison to the same months of last year.Having embarked on a quest to fly to many different corners of the world, the carrier has recently raised its number of international destinations to 127.
