Turkish Airlines narrow body life from Istanbul: the Anatolia turnarounds, the four sector days and why domestic is not the easy option

Three years at Turkish Airlines on the narrow body fleet out of Istanbul, and I want to write about the part of the job that nobody outside the airline understands: domestic and short haul, because everyone imagines Turkish as the airline with the most countries and forgets that a huge chunk of the flying is Istanbul to Anatolia and back four times a day.

The pattern

A typical narrow body day: sign on at 5:15 at Istanbul Airport, fly to Trabzon or Antalya or Diyarbakır or Erzurum, turn around in 40 minutes, fly back, do it again to somewhere else. Four sectors is normal, six on some pairings. Sign off at 15:00 or so, sometimes later if the weather closed a mountain airport. Then a night stop somewhere in the east once or twice a week, at a hotel that is fine, in a city you will not see because you arrive at 22:00 and leave at 06:00.

Why it is not easy

The domestic passenger. Turkish domestic flights are full, cheap enough that everyone flies, and the cabin is a cross section of the whole country. Families with four children and a birdcage, businessmen who want silence, grandmothers who want to talk, students, soldiers. The service is a full hot meal or a decent snack on an hour long flight, which means the trolley is moving the whole time. There is no downtime. On long haul you get a quiet four hours at 3am. On Trabzon and back you get 40 minutes on the ground to reload.

The weather

Black Sea and eastern airports have real weather. Diversions to a different city, holds, returning to Istanbul with the meal half served. Winter in the east means de-icing delays and 14 hour duties that started as 9 hour duties. The narrow body crew know the diversion procedure better than anyone.

The good parts

You are home a lot. Most days you sleep in your own bed. The Turkish crew community on narrow body is close because the flying is so intense, and there is a specific pride in it. And the wide body course comes after a period on narrow body, so everyone starts here and everyone remembers.

Pay

Turkish Airlines pays in Turkish lira with some components linked to hard currency for international layovers, and inflation has made the domestic heavy roster feel worse over the last few years relative to the crew doing New York and Tokyo with dollar allowances. That is the honest reason people want the wide body course: not the glamour, the allowances.

For foreign applicants

Turkish Airlines does hire non Turkish crew, mostly for language routes, and they tend to go to the wide body fleet faster because that is where the languages are needed. The domestic grind is mostly Turkish crew. If you are applying from abroad, you will probably not do the Anatolia turnarounds for long. If you are Turkish, you will, and it is the best training in the world for handling a full cabin quickly.