When the new airport is completed.

2nd Jan 2019 according to ba.com

Middle of the winter, less than 3 weeks from now? I'll believe it when I'll see it.
And that counts for TK move too.

Yep....very glad I'm still at the old airport next Friday and then not passing through for a few months, seems completely crazy to move during a peak travel period

Ba.com said that there was a ban on electronics in effect for about 9 months AFTER it was lifted to Turkey (in truth BA was just too cheap to do what they had to do securitywise), ba.com went and said all operations would be moving at IST, almost right up to the 29th of October, even though everyone knew that it was not going to happen, and again they are3 johnny come lately on this one too. I would say that there is less than a 1% chance of BA, or any other carrier having any real operations out of ISL at the beginning of the year, they will be lucky if they get the airport going full tilt at some point in 2019 at this rate and January 2, 2020 in fact would not be a crazy prediction. (Then again BA and UK folks should still find that to be hyper speed, I believe T5 from being proposed to finished was about 13 years, and a new runway at LHR seems to have been going on for more than 2 decades now...........

To be fair to them I have the same date appearing in my Singapore Airlines booking, they can only work with the official information- if they're being told IST will close on 29th Dec they can hardly plan to land there after....even if unofficially they think it's unlikely !

A bit of a long winded way of saying you have no idea?

Hurriyet is reporting the move has been moved back until March

?stanbul Havaliman??na büyük ta??nma ertelendi - Son Dakika Haberler

I am told the problem is the freight handling facility which is not complete. TK won't move until it is which sounds sensible enough.

Does not necessarily mean they won't shift non Star Alliance airlines first though as the Airport is "officially" open.

Of course March 2020 :D

Sounds like I did know, huh?

In English .


https://www.airlive.net/breaking-the-big-move-from-ataturk-to-new-istanbul-airport-delayed-until-march-2019/

Freight is only a small of it. There are many other issues

As long as they don't start operating at two different airports at the same time (e.g. BA or A3 arriving at one, and needing to catch a domestic TK flight from another), I don't care.

I never thought it would be fully operational this year anyway. Whether it would be by mid next year remains to be seen :D

Well Pucci, at that time I was imparting the information given to me by the BA airport manager at IST who had sworn that it was true. He is now retired, so I feel that I can share that now (although another poster around that time also have the same insight but no one ever jumped on him). Also it is a fact that the ban was rescinded about 9 months before BA rescinded it, which meant that on some days there are as many as 40 flights in total operating between the Turkey and the UK, and ONLY the BA flight(s) did not allow such electronics on board, the UK government has clearly posted that the ban was done but BA continued the fiction that it was still a UK government thing and it was quite simply that BA did not want to spend the money. Plain and simple.

Regarding the actual subject of this thread as posted ISL is more OFFICIALLY postponed until Q2 2019 as IIStat it would be and will most likely be delayed far more after that. I am sure though that if TK moves a few dozen flights in there, or they got free a few foreign carriers to operate from there, you will be the first to tell me that I got it wrong.

I'm sure you are right ... but what is the money angle you refer to?

The BA top brass at IST had something of a reputation - but I'd have thought they'd have been happy as Larry to get rid of the laptop rigmarole: so I'm surprised they didn't do just that as soon as possible. I'd assumed it was somehow down to extreme caution, notwithstanding the formal guidelines promulgated by UK authorities