Air Turkey Boeing 767-300ER

Air Turkey has been a fairly major operator of the Boeing 767 lineage. The first 767, a -200ER registered TC-OTA, arrived on 7 September 1985. Air Turkey ordered the larger 767-300ER on 9 September 1993 to fly to further away destinations than their A300/A310s and to smaller cities than the soon-to-come A330/A340s. They ordered 13 of the type, with options for a further 14.

The first of 13 Boeing 767-300ERs arrived into the Air Turkey fleet on 16 June 1995. On 7 August 1997, Air Turkey enabled 4 additional 767-300ERs as they retired older A300/A310s. The last 767 arrived on 6 June 1999, which was TC-OVL (pictured above).
These planes flew to smaller yet definitely not insignificant cities/places such as Sofia, Malta, Munich, Muscat, Addis Ababa, Baku, Geneva, and Hyderabad, just to name a few. They also flew on high demand domestic routes occasionally, such as Istanbul to Izmir and Ankara.

By 2018, the 767 fleet was looking old, especially compared to their fresh and fancy modern 787s and recently delivered A350s. So, on 8 August 2018, a month before the 25th anniversary of their initial order placement, Air Turkey outlined the retirement plan of the 767-300ERs. Note that by this time all 17 767s were operational.

• Step 1: By 1 January 2019, 3 767s would be retired. These would be the oldest (and first 3 to be delivered) 767s in the fleet
• Step 2: By 1 January 2020, 6 767s would be retired. By then, only 8 767s would remain in service, and they would be put onto exclusively domestic routes and flights to the southeastern Europe (such as the Balkan states).
• Step 3: Gradually retire the remaining 8 767s from 1 January 2020 until 1 January 2022.

So, in short, the 767s would be slowly retired from 2018 up until the very beginning of 2022. However, the unforeseen COVID-19 pandemic rapidly sped up this plan. So much so that Air Turkey would retire the 767-300ER from international destinations starting on 27 March 2020, a move that was supposed to only take place around the middle of 2021. On 16 July 2020, Air Turkey retired the last 767-300ER from passenger service. Out of the 8, 5 were placed into storage to be converted into freighters, meanwhile the other 4 would be immediately stripped of their passenger cabins and turned into quick temporary freighters mostly for COVID medical supplies. This would last until 10 January 2020, where the remaining 4 767s were placed into storage, and would also be converted into freighters.

Those 8 planes, along with 5 other former planes, are now flying as converted freighters for Air Turkey Cargo.

TC-OVL: 1999 Boeing 767-319ER | Air Turkey | Currently: In Active Service with Air Turkey Cargo, conversion to freighter started 15 February 2021 and ended March 2021.