Discover Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen Airport, 2019

While the last few posts have discussed Istanbul's old Atatürk Airport, which closed last year to passenger flights, which shifted to the gigantic new airport, the Asian side of the city also has a large international airport: Sabiha Gökçen, which is advertised here by Turkish Airlines, At this particular moment in time, TK was expanding its presence at the secondary base, and at the bottom of this print advert is a list of almost twenty destinations in Europe and the Near East, from Kuwait to London (although it doesn't say which airport). The mention of "Northern Cyprus" likewise does not get specific, but presumably this refers to Ercan International Airport. 

After the opening of the new airport, Turkish re-centralized its mainline operations, and transferred almost all its international flights from SAW to its wholly-owned subsidiary, AnadoluJet. By the end fo the first quarter of 2020, Turkish only served a few domestic routes from SAW, which is dominated by rival low-cost Turkish carrier Pegasus Airlines, which links Istanbul's Asian districts as far as Manchester and Karachi. 

Qatar Airways Route Network, November 2016: Europe

Like it's arch-rival Emirates, Qatar Airways blankets Europe with over two-dozen non-stops from Doha, although many of these are with its narrow-body A320 aircraft, the airline also intersperses its A330, B777, and B787 widebodies into these operations. Paris and London also see Qatar's double-decker A380 superjumbos. Qatar serves a number of cities which seldom see intercontinental flights, especially in southeastern Europe and the Balkans: Sarajevo and Skopje in particular. 

Atlas Global: Sharjah to Istanbul and Beyond, June 2016

Having repeatedly featured RAK Airways recently, the Timetablist stays with our theme of the less well-known of the United Arab Emirates' airports with Ras Al-Khaimah's neighboring emirate, Sharjah. Once a larger and more prominent waystation than Dubai, Sharjah today acts as a suburban bedroom community for its now-world-famous hub next door. With over a million and a half people, it is a significant urban center in its own right, and its airport, barely 20 kilometers from DXB, is served by about 20 airlines, regional flag carriers like Air India, Egyptair, Qatar Airways, Saudia and Pakistan International, to more distant and exotic carriers like Uzbekistan Airways and  SCAT of Kazakhstan.

Sharjah International may be most prominent due to its role as the home base of Air Arabia, the Easyjet of the Middle East, which dominates with flights to three score of destinations blanketing the UAE's near-catchment, from Sarajevo to Nairobi to Chittagong.

Also among the more low-cost carriers hanging at Sharjah is AtlasGlobal, a young Turkish airline whose new name (from the previous AtlasJet) makes it sound more like a cargo carrier than a passenger airline. With hubs at both of Istanbul's two airports and a fleet of red-striped A320s, AtlasGlobal seems to be following Air Arabia's model of generic no-frills regional connector. It will, it seems, splash out on advertising: here, along the humid corniche of Ras Al-Khaimah, these lightbox advertisements boast of AtlasGlobal's ultracheap roundtrips to Istanbul from Sharjah: at just AED892 (less than $250). Whether Atatürk or Sabiha Gokcen is not specified: AtlasGlobal services both from Sharjah, although it appears the Turkish dotted capital "I" was observed. Shame it couldn't get a better URL for its web address. 

Kuwait Airways: Three New Destinations, Summer 2013

Kuwait Airways is a bit of a dinosaur in the ecosystem of the Middle East's fast-moving air space, having long-since been eclipsed by the megacarrier trio of Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways, and having receded from its previous extents, which once reached as far as Chicago, Tokyo, and Singapore. In the present era, the slow-moving state carrier boasts when it returns to such nearby nations as Turkey. Here, an advert from mid-2013, showing a rather cautious re-entry into southeastern Europe, with two weekly flights to Vienna and Sarajevo, and a mere 3-weekly flights to Istanbul, now the sixth-busiest airport in Europe.