Istanbul Airport Airport will fully open on March 3, five months later than originally planned, Milliyet has reported.
The new airport, which serves Turkey's largest metropolis, was initially due to open at the end of October this year. However, at that time Turkish Airlines relocated only a small number of flights to the new gateway, keeping Istanbul Atatürk as its main hub for the time being. Subsequently, the full opening of the new airport was delayed to the end of 2018 and then to the first quarter of 2019.
In the first phase, the new airport will be able to handle 90 million passengers per year, growing to 200 million as handling capacity grows in the future.
According to the ch-aviation capacity module, Turkish Airlines currently operates 55 weekly departures per week out of the new airport to five domestic destinations, Baku Heydar Aliev International in Azerbaijan, and Nicosia/Lefkosa in Northern Cyprus using both B737-800 and A320-200 equipment. As of January 10 it will start adding another batch of new routes to destinations including Ashgabat, Diyarbakir, Frankfurt International, Hatay, Kayseri, Kuwait, London Gatwick, Moscow Vnukovo, Munich, Paris CDG, and Tbilisi.
