Atlasglobal

If you stood at a German airport in summer in the 2000s, you may well have seen one: a Boeing 757 with the titles “Atlasjet”, full of vacationers on their way to Turkey. The airline from Istanbul was in the air for almost two decades, first as a charter carrier in the orbit of the Öger travel group, later as a scheduled airline with its own network, and from 2015 under the name Atlasglobal. In February 2020 it was over. Here you can read how the airline came about, which aircraft it flew and how to recognize it on old photos and in logbooks.

Atlasglobal at a glance

Atlasglobal was a Turkish airline based in Istanbul that flew from June 2001 to February 2020. For most of that time it carried the name Atlasjet; the renaming to Atlasglobal only came in 2015. It was founded on March 14, 2001, as a subsidiary of Öger Holding, behind which stood the founder of the Hamburg tour operator Öger Tours. The first flight followed on June 1, 2001.

The business stood on two legs: charter flights for tour operators, mainly between Europe and the Turkish vacation regions, and from 2004 scheduled flights within Turkey and abroad. The home base was for a long time the old Istanbul Atatürk airport, most recently the new Istanbul Airport. Antalya Airport served as a second base, and at times Izmir and Adana also played a role.

For spotters, Atlasglobal is now a chapter from the archive. The airline remains interesting all the same: because of the Boeing 757 years, because of its unusually colorful fleet with regional jets and widebodies and because many of its aircraft kept flying with other operators later.

The history in stages

The name Öger was familiar to many Turkey vacationers in Germany. Vural Öger had opened a travel agency in Hamburg in 1969 and turned it, with Öger Tours, into one of the big Turkey specialists. An airline of its own within the group’s orbit was an obvious step: that way vacationers could be flown to Turkey reliably. In its first years, Atlasjet was exactly that, a feeder for package tourism.

The move into scheduled service in 2004 was the most important turning point. Atlasjet became a member of IATA, had itself audited to the IOSA safety standard and wanted to expand the share of scheduled flights significantly. What makes the difference between charter and scheduled service and why many leisure airlines switch between the two models is explained in the article charter flights vs. scheduled flights.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code KK: appeared in the flight number, on tickets and on display boards.
• ICAO code KKK: used by air traffic control in the flight plan.
• Callsign ATLASGLOBAL: this is how the crews identified themselves on the radio in the last years.

The codes are remarkably plain: KK and KKK have nothing to do with the name, they are pure identifiers. If you come across a KK flight number from the years 2001 to 2020 in an old logbook, you can consider the attribution to Atlasjet or Atlasglobal fairly certain. Still check the date: airline codes are sometimes reassigned after a company has ended.

The Atlasjet and Atlasglobal fleet

For a mid-sized airline, the fleet was astonishingly varied. Over the entire company history, 59 aircraft added up, spread across types from four manufacturers: Boeing, Airbus, McDonnell Douglas and Bombardier. The periods in the table are approximations because the sources do not give exact dates for every type.

Type	Number (total)	Period (approx.)	Spotter note
Boeing 757-200	10	2001–2012	The launch type, long slim fuselage, tall landing gear
Boeing 737-400	2	briefly around 2004/2005 and 2010/2011	Rare, only two aircraft
Boeing 737-800	1	not precisely documented	A one-off in the fleet history
McDonnell Douglas MD-83	3	2007	Rear-mounted engines and T-tail, including TC-AKM and TC-AKN
Bombardier CRJ700	2	2005–2007	Regional jet with rear-mounted engines
Bombardier CRJ900	3	2006–2010	Longer version, easy to recognize by the fuselage
Airbus A319-100	3	2005–2019	Shortest member of the family in the fleet
Airbus A320-200	15	2004–2019	For a long time the backbone of the fleet
Airbus A321	16 (2 × -100, 14 × -200)	until 2020	The airline’s last two aircraft
Airbus A330-200	3	2018–January 2020	Widebody jet, most recently two aircraft
Airbus A330-300	1	not precisely documented	Longer A330 version

The Boeing 757 stands for the early Atlasjet era. With it the airline flew vacationers over medium distances between Central Europe and Turkey, and it stayed in the fleet until 2012. After that, Atlasjet went all in on the A320 family. If you want to place a photo from those years, the guide telling the A318, A319, A320 and A321 apart reliably helps.

The Bombardier regional jets were unusual. The CRJ700 and CRJ900 suited domestic routes with fewer passengers better and disappeared from the fleet again by 2010. The MD-83, in turn, was not a long-term type for the airline: three aircraft appear in the fleet history in 2007, at least one of them leased from another operator.

Right at the end, Atlasglobal ventured into widebody aircraft. From 2018 A330-200s flew for the airline, which went back to the lessors at the end of January 2020. What remained were two A321-200s, on average around 22 years old, when flight operations ended in February 2020.

How to recognize Atlasjet and Atlasglobal

The surest way to identify the airline is via the titles on the fuselage and the Turkish TC registration. The name also tells you the era right away: if “Atlasjet” is on the aircraft, the photo dates from the time up to 2015. If you can read “Atlasglobal”, it belongs to the last five years. How airlines implement such name changes in the livery and why hybrid forms often result is described in the article when airlines change their look.

The type also helps with dating: a 757 points to the years up to 2012, a CRJ to the period between 2005 and 2010, an A330 to the years from 2018. And because many aircraft were leased and changed operators, you may also come across intermediate states with remnants of other colors on old photos. Help with identifying such intermediate states is given by the guide to hybrid and mixed liveries.

The difficult year 2007

Two events shaped the airline’s image in this year. On August 18, 2007, Flight 1011, an MD-83 with the registration TC-AKN on its way from Ercan in Northern Cyprus to Istanbul, was hijacked by two passengers shortly after takeoff. They pretended to have explosives with them and demanded a flight to Tehran. The aircraft officially landed in Antalya to refuel. After negotiations, women and children were first allowed to disembark, and finally the hijackers gave up. No one was seriously injured.

On November 30, 2007, the disaster of Flight 4203 followed. The MD-83 with the registration TC-AKM had taken off from Istanbul Atatürk shortly after midnight and was due to land at Isparta. On approach it hit a hill near Keçiborlu, around twelve kilometers west of the airport. All 57 people on board, 50 passengers and seven crew members, died. The aircraft belonged to World Focus Airlines and had been sublet to Atlasjet for a few months.

The final report of November 2008 named a navigation error by the crew as the cause, that is, an accident in which a fully controllable aircraft is flown into terrain. In addition came a defective ground proximity warning system that gave no audible warnings and an inexperienced crew that had not entered the approach procedure into the flight management system.

Expansion with subsidiaries and partners

In the 2010s the airline tried to grow beyond Turkey. With Atlasglobal Ukraine, an offshoot was created in Ukraine, and in 2013 Zagrosjet in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq was added. Under the name Atlasholidays, a tour operator of its own also belonged to the group.

The route network reflected this orientation. Besides destinations in Western Europe such as Paris, Amsterdam and London Stansted, flights to Tbilisi, Yerevan, Tehran, Baghdad, Sulaymaniyah, Beirut and Tel Aviv were most recently on the schedule, plus Ercan in Northern Cyprus. In the end, Atlasglobal was thus more an airline for markets around Turkey than a classic leisure carrier.

A cooperation with the US airline Ryan International went less well. In August 2012, Atlasjet contracted it for pilgrimage flights to Medina and Tel Aviv. In January 2013 the payments failed to arrive, Ryan International ended the cooperation, and the already struggling American company was subsequently wound up.

The end: two suspensions and insolvency

The financial problems became visible in fall 2019. On November 26, 2019, Atlasglobal temporarily suspended all flights in order to reorganize. A few charter flights with the A321s continued during this time.

Legally, the proceedings dragged on for a long time: only in July 2024 did the Turkish Court of Cassation confirm the bankruptcy. The timing is interesting. Only a few months earlier, Thomas Cook had collapsed, which by then also included Öger Tours. The tour operator from whose orbit Atlasjet had once emerged thus disappeared from the market almost at the same time as the airline. How the bankruptcy fits into the series of other collapses is shown in the article major airline bankruptcies in Europe.

Atlasglobal in a spotter’s everyday life today

For your logbook, Atlasglobal is above all an archive topic. If you photographed at German airports with Turkey traffic between 2001 and 2020, you have a good chance of finding Atlasjet aircraft in your collection. The airline flew to Hamburg and Düsseldorf, among others. Classic vantage points there are the Affenfelsen in Hamburg and the observation deck in Düsseldorf. To keep your old pictures findable, a clear filing system is worthwhile; tips are given in the guide archiving aircraft photos.

Tracing the whereabouts of individual aircraft is also exciting. Via the serial number you can find out where a former Atlasjet 757 or an A320 flew later. How that works is shown in the guide How old is this aircraft?.

If you travel to Turkey today, you will meet the successors in the market there: Turkish Airlines, Pegasus, SunExpress, AJet and leisure airlines like Corendon, Freebird or Tailwind. Onur Air has a similar story to Atlasglobal; it also flew vacationers from Europe for a long time and gave up in 2021. Before you take out your camera at Turkish airports, be sure to read the article on photography at airports in Turkey. For Istanbul itself, the guide to plane spotting in Istanbul helps.

Common mix-ups

• Thinking Atlasjet and Atlasglobal are two airlines – it is the same company, which renamed itself in 2015.
• Confusing Atlasglobal with Atlas Air – the US cargo airline has nothing to do with the Turkish company.
• Thinking Atlasjet was a pure charter carrier – from July 2004 the airline also flew scheduled service.
• Logging the MD-83 of Flight 4203 as an Atlasjet aircraft of its own – it belonged to World Focus Airlines and was only leased.
• Thinking the codes KK/KKK are short forms of the name – they are pure airline identifiers unrelated to the name.
• Thinking Atlasglobal was a Turkish Airlines subsidiary – the airline was independent and competed with Turkish Airlines and Pegasus.

Conclusion

Atlasglobal stands for almost two decades of Turkish aviation: from a charter carrier in the orbit of the Öger travel group, through the scheduled airline with the A320 family, to the last attempt with widebody aircraft. In between came the difficult year 2007, foreign offshoots in Ukraine and northern Iraq and a fleet that was more colorful than those of most competitors. For spotters, it is worth looking back at old photos, clean TC registrations and the aircraft that kept flying with other airlines after 2020.