Türkiye is on track to snap up roughly a fifth of all new passenger aircraft ordered across Europe and the CIS region in the coming two decades, according to Airbus. The company's vice president for market analysis and forecast, Antonio Da Costa, laid out the numbers at a briefing on Thursday: about 1,800 new planes for Turkish carriers by 2045, driven by passenger traffic growing at 4.5% a year — noticeably faster than the 2.9% pace expected for the wider region.
The detail behind those figures is striking. Airbus forecasts that the average person in Türkiye will take 3.1 flights a year by 2045, triple today's rate and ahead of the regional average of 2.4. The country's combined airline fleet is expected to more than double over the same period. Airbus' wider Global Market Forecast sees Europe and the CIS needing 8,190 new passenger aircraft by 2045 — 3,600 to fund growth and 4,590 to replace ageing planes — with Türkiye taking an outsized share of that total.
Why is Türkiye outpacing its neighbours? Geography and circumstance. Istanbul's role as a connecting hub between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East keeps strengthening, with Turkish carriers feeding transfer passengers through the city at scale. Da Costa also flagged an unexpected tailwind: regional conflict in the Middle East has diverted tourist and transit traffic away from parts of the Gulf and toward Türkiye. He expects some of that diverted demand to stick even if tensions ease, supporting the country's longer-term growth rather than simply causing a temporary spike.
For anyone planning a trip, this is good news in practice. A fleet that doubles in size usually means more daily frequencies on popular routes, more direct connections to secondary cities like Izmir, Antalya, Trabzon and the Turkish Riviera, and potentially sharper fares as carriers compete for the growing market. Istanbul's already excellent one-stop reach — you can connect between most of Europe and much of Asia or Africa with a single stop there — should get broader still.
If Türkiye has been sitting on your list, the next couple of decades look set to make getting there, and getting around once you've arrived, easier than ever. Daily Sabah Travel has the original story.
