Aviation Turkey: Dear Mr. Kürşad Koçak, you have successfully completed a very important operation in the process of the big transfer from Atatürk Airport to Istanbul Airport. Activities at Istanbul Airport have started with doubled station capacity and temporary storage unit buildings, office spaces, equipment maintenance workshop and parking areas. Could you inform us briefly about the details of the big and successful move as well as your capacity, investments and operations at Istanbul Airport?

Kürşad Koçak: With the opening of Istanbul Airport, we moved our facilities at the Atatürk Airport to our new station within a successful operation of 30 hours. We used 186 trucking rigs to transport around 600 ground handling services equipment in total to our new facility; these included the large volume vehicles such as passenger buses and passenger stairs. We have doubled the capacity of our new facilities at Istanbul Airport compared to Atatürk Airport. Our new facilities cover approximately an area of 40,000 square meters, including an indoor area of 20,000 square meters. Our temporary storage unit building at Istanbul Airport has been constructed to be twice as large as our storage units at Atatürk Airport. Our station building, equipment maintenance workshop and parking areas have also been designed to have higher capacities than the ones at Atatürk Airport. We take on the task of ground handling services for 45 airlines in Istanbul with our 1,200 employees.

Aviation Turkey: With Havaş, you provide services for more than 200 airlines in 28 airports in Turkey as well as Riga Airport in Latvia and Medinah Airport in Saudi Arabia. Can you inform us about your services at the Riga and Medinah airports?

Kürşad Koçak: We carried our 86 years of experience and knowledge that we have acquired in ground handling services in Turkey to Riga first and then to Medina with the goal to become a global brand. We have been operating at Riga Airport in Latvia, one of the important countries in the Northern Europe in terms of aviation potential, through our affiliates since 2010 and at Medinah Airport, one of the prominent airports in terms of pilgrimage tourism, in Saudi Arabia since 2014. In Riga, we provide services for AirBaltic along with other airline companies such as Turkish Airlines, SAS, Ukraine Airlines, Air Europa, UTair, Aegean Airlines, Onurair, Freebird, Corendon, LOT, Norwegian, and Getjet. In Medina, we manage ground handling operations of several airline companies such as Royal Jordanian, Air Arabia, Tunis Air, Pegasus, Sun Express, Gulf Air, Jazeera Airways, Atlasglobal, Tailwind, and Badr. Our activities involve extensive passenger and operation services including passenger and luggage services, ramp, load check and communication, de-icing, cargo, flight operations, transportation, aircraft cleaning, representation and supervision. We handle over 1.5 million pieces of baggage per year and host nearly 28,000 flights and over 4 million passengers at the Riga and Medinah Airports.

Aviation Turkey: Havaş is the first Turkish company with ground handling services license in Saudi Arabia. Havaş Riga Station (RIX) has been certified with ISAGO certification. How would you evaluate your international achievements and certification processes?

Kürşad Koçak: Our sector is one of the most challenging sectors in the world with a 7/24 work system along with the requirements to conduct operations in a fast way without compromising security, taking into account variable conditions and geographical differences in the job field. We may say that the sustainability of this dynamic structure is in direct proportion with the fulfillment of global standards. In this sense, we consider the certificates given by internationally accredited organizations for the standards we fulfill under the titles related to our management systems such as categories of occupational health and safety, service quality, business continuity, and ensuring environmental impacts and operational security in a sustainable way as the guarantee of our corporate sustainability as well.

Our ability to conduct our operations in all the fields we operate in both domestic and international markets by establishing interconnected systems that are adapted for differing conditions lays the ground for our international achievements in parallel with our goal to become a global brand. In addition to ISAGO certificates received by our Riga and Medina stations, we are also members of Airport Service Association (ASA) and IATA Ground Handling Council (IGHC). We provide services to approx. 465 thousand flights per year together with our affiliates and we also provide services to over 130 million passengers per year by carrying 860,000 tons of cargo and over 100 million of luggage.

Aviation Turkey: What are the responsibilities of Havaş in terms of cargo services?

Kürşad Koçak: In addition to our new 14,000 square meter temporary storage unit building at the Istanbul Airport, we currently also have warehouses at Atatürk Airport, Ankara Esenboğa Airport and Izmir Adnan Menderes Airport. We take on the task of the administration of import and export cargos by storing general cargos, valuable cargos, chilled cargo, cargos with hazardous substances and radioactive materials at our facilities. As per the national and international regulations, we continue our investments in our facilities to include the latest technology and equipment in our operations and to increase our service diversity. We increased our capacity at our warehouse at Izmir Adnan Menderes Airport and our cold storage depot at Ankara Esenboğa Airport in the last 2 years. In addition, we added two reefer trucks to the fleet of our warehouse in Istanbul last year which were particularly developed by our party as a first in the air cargo sector. With these vehicles, we transport cargo with requirements to be kept constantly cold, to the aircraft by protecting them from external conditions or carry the incoming cargo to our cold storage depots at our facilities under the same conditions. In addition, we also provide scheduled bonded carrier services between Istanbul – Ankara and Istanbul - Izmir. Through our transportation service, we carry cargo sent from various cities to the most appropriate airlines. We plan to include refrigerated vehicles in our fleet working in these lines soon.

Aviation Turkey: What kind of growth do you predict in domestic and international fields in the next five years?

Kürşad Koçak: In addition to the growth in our current operations in Turkey, Latvia and Saudi Arabia, we have the goal to enter into the markets abroad, including the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe