Toward the end of this year’s Super Bowl, after many of the most expensive TV advertisements of the year had aired, viewers may have noticed an odd brand tie-in for the upcoming “Batman vs. Superman” movie, premiering at the end of this month: Turkish Airlines. In the ad, actors from the film, Ben Affleck and Jesse Eisenberg, extol the virtues of Turkish’s new passenger service to Gotham City, home town of Batman, and Metropolis, Superman’s adopted stomping ground. What better way to show how fast the carrier has grown than to depict it serving even fictional U.S. cities?
While Turkish Airlines continues its media blitz on the American market, its airfreight division, Turkish Cargo,is making similar moves into an increasing number of U.S. destinations. Turkish has served such cities as Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco for many years, but it entered the North American freighter market only last spring with scheduled cargo flights to Chicago. Soon it followed up with freighter service to Atlanta and New York’s JFK with weekly freighter service. By October, widebody passenger service was offered by Turkish seven times a week to Miami. This spring, passenger flights to Atlanta will be added, with both of these routes opening up increased capacity for belly-hold cargo.
The expansion is especially notable, considering that many large carriers saw little to no growth in their air cargo business in 2015. Turkish Cargo, however, has bucked that trend for more than a decade, gaining momentum with each passing year. In 2005, the carrier lifted 100,000 tonnes, doubling that figure to 200,000 tonnes by 2009. A year later it was up to 300,000 per year, then 400,000 in 2012, and 500,000 in 2013. Last year, its total tonnage was up 8.4 percent over 2014, to 720,000 tonnes. And this year, Turkish has set an ambitious target of 815,000 tonnes of cargo throughput.
Adam Rod of the Chicago Department of Aviation, which oversees O’Hare International Airport, said the growth of Turkish Airlines over the past decade has been extraordinary. O’Hare has seen annual cargo volumes for the last few years of about 1.7 million tonnes, 75 percent of which is international airfreight. Of that total, Turkish is carrying “somewhere around 1 to 2 percent of our international imports and exports,” he said, with a value of about US$500 million. For a carrier with essentially only one 777 passenger flight per day at a global hub airport, plus weekly A330 freighter service that began last spring, those figures are “pretty impressive,” Rod said.
Halit Anlatan, vice president, sales and marketing, for Turkish Cargo, said that, as a strategy, the airline focused on high-yield and high-value cargo last year more than previous years. “This helped us to handle yield pressure, which is the problem in the industry in general,” he said. But one of the crucial reasons for the recent successes at Turkish Cargo, he added, has been leveraging the carrier’s large long-haul network to serve the strong North America to Asia-Pacific corridor. With many routes to Asia already secured, the carrier turned its focus to the West and shows no signs of slowing down in its pursuit of American cargo.
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