Originally Posted by
mafaky
Is this only a gutfeel or is it an educated guess behind which you have some reliable clues?
My personal opinion (guess) is beginning April may still be difficult, or say a rather "imposed" and "difficult to achieve without bearing the negative consequences" date. A date in the second half of May 2109 looks more realistic to me. Buuut: if they can't do it by the end of May, yes they will really have to postpone it to October, because of the intervening high and hot summer season. The best they can do is to shift some more domestic and international flights to ISL but still keeping the ISL:IST airplane movements on 1:10 or 1.5:10 ratio. It will be technically impossible (or very very risky) on the ATC side to split the total aircraft movements on fifty fifty (or even 2:10) basis for both airports.
Makes sense.
I also cannot believe that TK would welcome such a split of flights between ISL and IST given the huge amount of connecting passengers. It would make many short to medium layovers impossible if needing to change airport - and thousands of potential costumers would even simply not buy a ticket at all if they see an airport change is required. They might move over a few more flights with a relative low number of connecting passengers or routes of which they know they can take a hit as they are one of the few airlines operating it (for example the route to ECN route in Northern Cyprus being among the first which was already moved over).
For TK it would probably mean moving all flights to ISL at once, or stay at IST for the time being until ISL is completely ready.