Tailwind Airlines

Tailwind Airlines is one of those airlines many spotters only notice when it suddenly shows up in the viewfinder: a Boeing 737 with a Turkish registration, an unfamiliar code on the tracker and a small, old fleet of which only a part still flies at all. This page shows you what is behind the small charter and wet-lease airline, how to identify it reliably and why the hunt for it is worth it.

Tailwind Airlines at a glance

Tailwind Airlines is a Turkish charter and wet-lease airline headquartered in Istanbul. In Turkish it trades as Tailwind Havayolları. It started as a joint project of Turkish and British businesspeople; for the founding year, reference works vary between 2006 and 2008. What is certain: in May 2009 Tailwind received its operating license from the Turkish civil aviation authority, and the first commercial flights took off the same month.

The new Istanbul Airport and above all Antalya Airport are listed as hubs. Antalya is the airline’s real workplace: from the Turkish Riviera, Tailwind shuttles vacationers back and forth between Europe and the Mediterranean resorts.

Unlike network airlines such as Turkish Airlines or low-cost carriers such as Pegasus, Tailwind sells its capacity mainly to third parties. The customers are tour operators that charter whole aircraft and other airlines that rent an aircraft with crew. There is no alliance membership – it would not fit this business model anyway.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code TI: appears in the flight number when Tailwind flies under its own name.
• ICAO code TWI: appears in the air traffic control flight plan and on flight trackers.
• Callsign TAILWIND: how the crew identifies itself on the radio.

For a charter and wet-lease airline, the codes are especially important to spotters. When a tour operator books a flight, the departure board at the airport often still shows the Tailwind flight number. If Tailwind instead flies on wet lease for another airline, the client’s flight number may be shown – depending on the contract, with or without the Tailwind callsign on the radio. The most reliable anchor remains the registration on the aircraft.

Charter and ACMI: what Tailwind actually does

Two terms keep appearing in Tailwind’s profile: charter and wet lease, also called ACMI in industry jargon. Both describe ways of renting out an aircraft – but to different customers.

Model	Customer	What Tailwind provides	What you see at the spot
Charter	Tour operators	Aircraft, crew and flight operation for vacation flights	Tailwind 737 with its own code, often on vacation routes to Turkey
Wet lease (ACMI)	Other airlines	Aircraft, crew, maintenance, insurance – the aircraft together with crew, maintenance and insurance	Tailwind registration, but possibly another flight number or another airline’s colors

The abbreviation ACMI stands for exactly these four building blocks. For airlines it is practical when they need capacity at short notice, for example in summer, during maintenance bottlenecks or when launching new routes. For Tailwind it means the small fleet can be kept busy flexibly. The article Wet lease explained explains more of the background, and you can find the difference between charter and scheduled service under Charter flight vs. scheduled flight.

A recent example of charter traffic: according to an April 2026 report, from the end of April 2026 Tailwind flies charter chains on behalf of a Russian tour operator from Krasnodar, Grozny, Astrakhan and Saratov to Antalya. Programs like this show how broad the customer range of a Turkish charter airline can be.

The fleet: Boeing 737 in two generations

Since its start Tailwind has relied exclusively on the Boeing 737. In 2013 the fleet consisted of five 737-400s; some 737-800s were added later. The latest available fleet overviews from 2025 and 2026 paint a similar picture but differ in the details:

Type	Seats	Generation	Spotter note
Boeing 737-400	168	737 Classic	Has become rare; at Tailwind in storage according to the latest overview
Boeing 737-800	189	737 Next Generation	Modern, widespread type; the active part of Tailwind’s fleet

An August 2025 overview lists five 737-400s and two 737-800s. A February 2026 listing comes to five aircraft – three 737-400s and two 737-800s – with an average age of about 25 years and lists the 737-400s and one of the 737-800s as inactive. The exact number of active aircraft is therefore uncertain – the only certainty is that the fleet is small and old. That is precisely what makes Tailwind interesting to collectors: if you want to catch all the registrations, you have a manageable list, but hardly any plannable chances.

The Boeing 737-400 is the stretched version of the Classic generation and was very popular with leisure airlines in the 1990s. Today most remaining examples fly as freighters, for instance as the 737-400SF. The Boeing 737-800, on the other hand, you know from countless airlines – at Tailwind it is more the everyday workhorse. The manufacturer of both types is Boeing.

737-400 or 737-800? How to tell them apart

At Tailwind both types carry the same TC- registration scheme, and from a distance they look alike. A few details reveal the generation immediately, though – and with it whether you have a rarity or an everyday 737 in front of your lens.

The surest feature is the combination of fuselage length and wing: the 737-800 looks clearly more stretched and has the more modern, longer wing of the Next Generation. If in doubt, the tracker or a look in a fleet database with the registration helps. You can find a detailed comparison of all generations in the guide How to tell the Boeing 737 Original, Classic, NG and MAX apart. How old a particular aircraft is, the article Finding out an aircraft’s age tells you.

How to recognize Tailwind

With such a small airline every detail counts. These features help you assign it:

On wet lease, a Tailwind aircraft can also show up in another airline’s colors. The most prominent example is the 737-800 TC-TLH: it was leased to Lebanon’s Wings of Lebanon and wore their paint scheme. After a major technical check in Turkey, Tailwind temporarily used the aircraft on its own flights in 2016, including to Tel Aviv. Because Lebanon and Israel are officially in a state of war, the Lebanese authorities then imposed a ban on entry for precisely this aircraft. For spotters the case is a lesson: with leased aircraft the paint says little, the registration everything.

Tailwind in the Turkish charter landscape

Turkey is one of the most important vacation destinations for travelers from Germany, and the market for leisure and charter flights is correspondingly large. Tailwind is a small player in it. Larger leisure airlines such as SunExpress or Corendon fly with significantly more aircraft and more fixed schedules. Tailwind rather fills gaps: extra capacity in summer, charter chains for individual operators or wet-lease assignments for airlines that are suddenly short an aircraft.

A look at the past is worthwhile, too. With Onur Air and Atlasglobal, several Turkish leisure and charter airlines have meanwhile disappeared. That Tailwind has hung on since 2009 with a small 737 fleet is quite remarkable in this environment – even if the fleet has visibly aged today.

Spotting Tailwind in Germany

Don’t expect fixed scheduled flights to Germany from Tailwind. What exists depends on the contracts of the given season. Historically, though, Germany was an important market: a 2013 destination list names Berlin, Bremen, Cologne, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Hamburg, Hanover, Leipzig, Munich, Nuremberg and Stuttgart, almost always on vacation routes to Turkey. The 737-800 TC-TLH, for example, shuttled between Antalya and Düsseldorf in 2016.

When Tailwind flies to Germany in a season, big leisure airports are the first address, such as Düsseldorf Airport or Hanover Airport. Tips on locations are in the guides Plane spotting in Düsseldorf and Plane spotting in Hanover.

Spotting Tailwind in Turkey

Your best chances are right on site. In Antalya in peak season, leisure airlines from all over Europe stand side by side, and Tailwind is one of the local players there. The airline is registered in Istanbul, too. Before you unpack your camera at Turkish airports, you should know the rules: photography near airports is handled more strictly in Turkey than in Germany in some cases. What you need to observe is explained in the article Photography at airports in Turkey; for the metropolis on the Bosphorus there is also the guide Plane spotting in Istanbul.

Common mix-ups

• Taking TI for a country code – the IATA code TI is purely an airline identifier and belongs to Tailwind.
• Assuming every Turkish 737 is Tailwind – other Turkish airlines also fly the 737 with TC- registrations. Only the registration and tracker give certainty.
• Treating the paint as decisive – on wet lease, a Tailwind 737 can fly in another airline’s colors.
• Logging a 737-400 as a 737-800 – watch the engine shape, wingtips and fuselage length.
• Equating the flight number with the operating airline – the ICAO code TWI shows who is really flying.
• Treating old destination lists as current – a charter airline’s schedule changes from season to season.

Conclusion

Tailwind Airlines is not an airline you see every day – and that is exactly what makes it appealing. The small Turkish charter and wet-lease airline has flown exclusively Boeing 737s since 2009, including the 737-400, a type that has almost vanished from European vacation traffic and that, according to the latest overviews, is in storage at Tailwind as well. If you watch for the ICAO code TWI, note the TC- registration carefully and don’t let other flight numbers or paint schemes fool you, you can log a real rarity.