February 21, 2008

SunExpress, the private carrier with the widest regional flights network, took delivery of its new aircraft that it purchased from Boeing. The new Boeing 737-800 with the tail registration name TC-SUZ, will be the 14th aircraft at SunExpress’ fleet. The airplane which took off from Boeing’s facilities at Seattle by February 20th, landed at Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen International Airport by February 21st.

At the welcoming ceremony, Paul Schwaiger, SunExpress Managing Director said, “2008 will be a strategic growth year for SunExpress. This year, including the one we took delivery today, we will add 4 new aircraft to our fleet and start operating Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen based international and domestic flights. We aim to increase our revenue and the number of our passengers by approximately 20% with our renewed fleet that will consist 17 a/c as of this summer season.”

Hacı Say, SunExpress Deputy Managing Director, added “This new aircraft that landed at Istanbul today, will serve to our passengers flying to/from Sabiha Gokcen as of March 30. We will bring a challenging and service quality based competition to the Sabiha Gokcen flights.”

Apart from SunExpress’ senior management, executives from Boeing Commercial Airplanes also attended to the ceremony.

About SunExpress
SunExpress was founded as a joint venture agreement between Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa at 1989. Operating charter flights for approximately 10 years, SunExpress became the first private airline company, to offer international scheduled flights from Turkey with its Antalya-Frankfurt flight in 2001. SunExpress also connected Izmir with the major cities in Anatolia by offering direct domestic flights, which started on March 26, 2006 for the first time in Turkey. SunExpress’ direct domestic flights quickly reached a high occupancy rate, showing that many cities had similar potential. And SunExpress added Antalya and Diyarbakır based domestic flights while increasing the number of destinations from Izmir. As of 2008 summer season SunExpress will operate a fleet of 17 aircraft, 14 B737-800s and 3 B757-200s. The seat capacity will become 3.333 and the average age 6.3.

About Boeing 737s
The most selling aircraft model of civil aviation, 7.698 Boeing 737s were ordered as of today. 4.566 of these orders came to New Generation 737s (-600, -700, -700BBJ, -700C, -800, -800BBJ, -900, -900BBJ, -900ER, -T43A). The 737-800s enjoyed the highest demand by ¬2.667 orders. Renowned for their reliability, fuel efficiency and commercial performance, the 737-800 can carry between 162-189 passengers depending on the configuration. With a maximum speed of 961.6 km/h (Mach 0.785) this model’s range is 5.425 km.