Turkish Airlines serves more countries than any other airline on earth, around 130 as of late 2025. That’s more than Air France-KLM, Lufthansa, or Emirates can reach. The distinction has less to do with the carrier itself than with the geography sitting underneath it.

A grass field on the Bosphorus

Istanbul is the only major city in the world spread across two continents, with the Bosphorus strait splitting its European half from its Asian half. Commercial aviation arrived in 1933 with a grass airstrip at Yeşilköy, about 24 km west of the historic peninsula. The field grew into a paved civil airport in 1953, was renamed Atatürk International in 1985, and steadily became Turkey’s primary gateway.

By the early 2010s Atatürk had a problem. Turkish Airlines was expanding aggressively into Africa, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, and the airport’s runways, taxiways, and ground footprint simply couldn’t absorb the growth. The state moved early. Construction on a replacement began in 2015 on roughly 76 square kilometers of reclaimed forest land north of the city, near the Black Sea coast.

That replacement, IST or Istanbul Airport, opened to commercial traffic in 2019 and absorbed all of Turkish Airlines’ scheduled operations within a 45-hour window. The design target is 200 million passengers a year across four terminals and six runways once fully built out. The current single terminal already ranks among the largest buildings on earth by floor area, and within three years of opening IST had reclaimed Turkish Airlines’ position as Europe’s most connected hub by destination count.

The geographic advantage is the structural one. A four-hour flight radius from Istanbul covers around 60 countries holding more than a billion people, stretching from London to Lagos and Moscow to Mumbai. Few cities on earth sit on top of that kind of catchment.

How Istanbul plays in SkyChart

In SkyChart’s economic model Istanbul is one of 103 hub cities on the 496-city map, with an economic value of 85 and a tourist appeal of 95. That tourist score is the top tier in the simulation, which it shares with Sydney, Tokyo, and Bangkok. The combination of business weight and leisure draw is unusual. Most cities lean one way or the other (Zurich is a business hub with modest tourist pull, Cancun is the opposite), and Istanbul carries both at high intensity.

For a player starting near the front of the 90-year simulation, Istanbul is more interesting for where it sits on your network than for raw traffic at launch. Open routes from Istanbul to anything within roughly 4,000 km and you’ve connected two regions that would otherwise require a two-leg routing through a Western European hub. Once you have a handful of those spokes, the city’s hub status starts paying real dividends. Connecting passengers stack on top of point-to-point demand, and your slot allocation works harder than it does at a pure origin-destination market.

Population in the simulation starts at 704,000 with a two percent annual growth rate. By the 1990s campaign decade you’re flying into a metro of 8 to 10 million people, and the slot scarcity at the city’s main gates becomes a strategic problem rather than a background detail. Players who lock in slot positions early in the simulation tend to keep them. Players who wait for the economics to look obvious tend to find the door closed.

Strategic takeaway

The temptation with hub cities is to wait until the numbers justify the investment before committing slots. With Istanbul that approach usually arrives too late. Slot pricing scales with the city’s economic value as the simulation progresses, and the cities that grow into true mega-hubs (Istanbul, Dubai, and Singapore among them) see the steepest curves on that scale.

A modestly loaded Istanbul route in the 1960s or 70s is cheap to maintain and gives you a slot anchor for when the city’s population doubles, then doubles again. Pair Istanbul with a long-range narrowbody once you reach the 1960s and you can serve most of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia from a single base. That kind of geographic leverage is hard to find elsewhere on the map, which is also why the real-world version of this strategy has worked out reasonably well for Turkish Airlines over the past two decades.

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