Hatay Airport

This morning I flew back to Istanbul from Antakya. As discussed earlier, an Airport opened in the Hatay Province in December of 2007. There are two problems with this airport:

• It is a $30 cab drive away from the city center. Putting the airport so far away was not really necessary as there is almost nothing outside the city (5km from the center) except small villages.
• There is only one flight a day to Istanbul. This is actually two problems, the flight only goes to the Ataturk airport, which is difficult to get to from the asian side of Istanbul and the flight leaves Hatay at 5:30am.

It may have been better to have taken a bus to Adana and taken a more conveniently timed flight back to the other, conveniently placed Istanbul airport (Sabiha Gokcen). It would have been at least a 2 hour bus ride but it would have been inexpensive and would have avoided the 2 hour drive through traffic in Istanbul.

The other interesting thing about the Hatay Airport is it is essentially a giant parking lot for airplanes. There is a road that goes around the perimeter with a few military jeeps driving around the periphery over and over, I am assuming this is to prevent someone from shooting down a plane.

Here is the terminal building from about 4:45am today, notice the plane parked in the background. Also, the cars parked directly in front of the building put it in perspective, I would guess about 1500 sq.f.:



Here is the plane viewed from inside the terminal. This is something I have not seen for a while in Turkey, but they make you pick your luggage out of a pile after you checked in. Basically, your bags will not be put on the plane if you don't claim them on the way out: