Turkish Airlines Hajj and Umrah season from the crew side: the Jeddah and Medina flights, the pilgrims, the roster and what the Turkish crew do differently

THY, Istanbul, and the Hajj season came up in the PIA thread and the crisis thread and nobody has written it from the Turkish side, where it is a large part of the roster for two months a year. Here it is.

The season

The Hajj weeks and the Umrah months (the months around Ramadan particularly), when THY runs additional flights to Jeddah and Medina from Istanbul and from the Anatolian cities (Konya, Kayseri, Gaziantep, Diyarbakır, Trabzon and more), on the wide bodies and the narrow bodies, for the Turkish pilgrims and the pilgrims from the countries THY connects through Istanbul.

The flights

Full. Every seat, every flight, with passengers who are often elderly, often flying for the first time, in the ihram clothing on the outbound for the men, with Zamzam water on the return in quantities that test the bins. The service is adapted: the meal timings around the prayer, the announcements with the religious greeting, the crew trained in the specifics. Medina airport in the season is an operation of its own.

The passengers

The most grateful passengers of the year and the most in need of help. The elderly pilgrim who has saved for a decade for this flight, who does not know how the seatbelt works, who is afraid and joyful at once. The crew who do the Hajj season well are the ones who treat it as the service of a lifetime for every passenger, because for the passenger it is.

The roster in the season

Heavy. The Jeddah and Medina sectors are four hours and the turnarounds in the season are long because the boarding is slow. The Anatolian city to Medina flights mean night stops in the Anatolian cities for the Istanbul crew. The wide body crew do the Istanbul to Jeddah on the 777s and the A330s and the narrow body crew do the Anatolian city departures. The season is the busiest two months of the narrow body year after the summer.

What the Turkish crew do differently

Many of the crew are Muslim and the season is personal: the crew who have done the Hajj themselves are the ones the pursers put on the flights, because they know what the passengers are going through. The announcements and the prayer timings are done with care. The Zamzam water is handled with the respect it deserves and with a bin management plan. And the crew who are not Muslim learn the season as a cultural and professional specialism, which is respected.

The honest difficulty

The tiredness, the slow boardings, the passengers who need help with everything, the return flights with the water. And the emotion, which the crew feel too: a flight of pilgrims landing in Medina for the first time is a cabin of people in tears, and the crew are not immune.

For foreign crew at THY

You will fly the season. Learn it. The Turkish crew will teach it. It is the flying the Hassan thread called the most meaningful of a career and the THY version is the same.