Turkish Airlines will soon be known internationally as Türkiye Hava Yollari – the traditional Turkish spelling of the airline. The national flag carrier plans to rebrand after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan changed the official name of the country from Turkey to Türkiye at the United Nations.
Turkey decided to start using Türkiye (the traditional Turkish spelling) as its official name in December 2021 and the country’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu recently sent a letter to the United Nations asking for an official name change. The UN almost immediately approved the request.
At the launch of the Türksat 5B Satellite on Tuesday, President Erdogan confirmed that Turkish Airlines would also be rebranded as part of the country’s renaming.
“There is no longer ‘Turkey’, there is ‘Türkiye’,” Erdogan said. “We will write ‘Türkiye Hava Yollari ‘, not ‘Turkish Airlines,” he continued.
Hava Yollari means ‘airline’ in Turkish.
The Turkish government owns a 49 per cent stake in the flag carrier with the rest of the airline publicly traded. On Tuesday, the memo hadn’t seemingly reached executives at the airline which continued to call itself Turkish Airlines publicly, although the airline has been known as Türk Hava Yollari domestically since its inception in 1933.
Should the rebranding go ahead, the airline will have to repaint as many as 301 planes with the updated livery.
On Tuesday, Türkiye’s government hit back at claims that the country was not safe to visit, saying that it “continues to fight against terrorism in the most effective way”. The statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is believed to be in response to a travel alert by the Israeli government which urged its citizens to leave the country over safety fears.
What an idiot. The current name is “Turkish Airlines”. It is not “Turkey Airlines”. So the change to THY is stupid.