Air Traffic Control

Aviation history is an area that has interested me since my undergraduate days. Apart from a couple articles there are very few historical studies of civil aviation, in stark contrast to the attention lavished on military aviation.[1] For my masters thesis I considered the aviation companies that operated in early Republican Turkey (1923-33), something which will, I hope, become a chapter in a more wide-ranging history of civil aviation that I hope eventually to write.[2] As there was no independent aviation ministry during my time period, the archival sources for my masters dissertation were spread across the files of several state agencies, each of which claimed oversight over part of this emerging area of activity. The most important was the Ministry of Public Works (MPW), which had the authority to sign contracts with private airline companies, as well as records of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the General Staff. I also consulted periodicals of the time. Although several of the airlines concerned continue to operate in one form or another, only one, Lufthansa, had a business archive that I could consult.  I am grateful to its director, Luisa Schuermann, for her assistance in locating material for my research.

As MPW records as well as reports by western military attachés demonstrate, when it came to aviation there were strong continuities between the late Ottoman Empire and the new Republic of Turkey. The first air mail delivery from Istanbul to Cairo took place in 1914. In September 1918 the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant referred to plans to establish an air service between British-occupied Palestine and Paris. After the Armistice of Mudros there were moves to establish an air mail service between European cities and Istanbul. General Franchet d’Esperey launched a military air mail service between Istanbul and Bucharest in July 1919, under the aegis of the Eastern Allied Armies Command.[3]

That said, in the immediate postwar years would-be operators of air routes in Turkey had to work within a challenging environment, thanks to the parallel administrations in Istanbul and Ankara. When the Franco-Roumaine Company sought permission to operate a route linking Paris and Istanbul in August 1920, it elected to apply to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Istanbul government, and a contract was signed later that month.[4] The political turmoil caused by the Treaty of Sèvres left it still-born. Yet the Ankara government was slow to respond to similar requests. In 1924, the company renewed its offer, and a twenty-year agreement was reached for a service between Istanbul and Bucharest. Aircraft operating under this agreement served Istanbul Yeşilköy Airport, which was a dual civil-military airfield under overall military control.

MAYNARD OWEN WILLIAMS, PHOTOGRAPH OF AERO ESPRESSO ITALIANA’S BÜYÜKDERE SEAPLANE PORT, 1928.

The agreement with Franco-Roumaine was a case of give-and-take: the Turkish state exempted the company from customs duties, but also stipulated that all the company’s officers were to be Turkish citizens.  The inaugural flight took place on March 15, 1926, and 73 further flights followed between March and July. In 1928 a Sofia-Istanbul route was added. The company added to its network until it was nationalized, purchased by the Board of Executive Deputies in April 1937.

In September 1924 Aero Espresso Italiana reached an agreement with the MPW to establish a seaplane route from Brindisi to Istanbul via Thessaloniki. This too was a twenty-year agreement, but explicitly gave the Turkish state the right to expropriate the company on expiration. Once again, it stipulated that the company needed a majority of Turkish national staff. The company added a Brindisi-Athens-Istanbul route in August 1926, and then developed an ambitious route from London via Paris-Milan-Rome to Brindisi by plane, continuing to Istanbul by seaplane.

Italian ambitions led to increasing tensions between Aero Espresso and Ankara. The Turkish Ministry of National Defence formally warned the company that it was straying from the authorized flight corridors within Turkish borders. At the Fascist Congress of 19 March 1934, Mussolini declared that Italy’s destiny lay in the Mediterranean and Africa. That October the Italian state expropriated Aero Espresso Italiana and merged it into Ala Littoria, without informing Turkish officials. This unilateral act, combined with aggressive moves to establish a new Italian Empire in Abyssinia led Ankara to terminate its agreement with Aero Espresso in 1936.

AERO ESPRESSO ITALIANA FLIGHT ROSTER, OCTOBER 1927. DCA, NAFIA VEKÂLETI 58-13-1.

Other would-be providers of air services met with disappointments. Junkers Flugzeugwerke AG approached the MPW in October 1925 and a draft contract was drawn up for an Ankara-Istanbul-Sofia and an Ankara-Kayseri-Diyarbakır-Tabriz-Tehran route, but the Turkish government did not sign it.[5] A year later, the company was allowed to operate test flights between Istanbul-Ankara and Ankara-Kayseri, which led to twice weekly flights between Istanbul and Ankara. The company tried to secure extensions to its agreement, but in 1932 the firm’s hopes ended when the Turkish government contracted the American Curtiss-Wright Group to produce engines and establish air lines. This had a similarly chilling effect on Deutsche Lufthansa, who had reached their own agreement for service between Berlin and Istanbul in January 1930. In an echo of the famous Baghdadbahn, Lufthansa proposed to extend their service from Berlin to Baghdad.

For the young Republic it seems to have been a case of using partnerships with well-established foreign companies for technology transfer, until sufficient expertise and in particular trained manpower was in place for the state to go it alone. And yet, as the contract with Curtiss-Wright shows, this transition was not made overnight.

Negotiations over contracts were stalked by the spectre of the old Ottoman-era capitulations, over fears that national sovereignty might be compromised. For the young Republic it seems to have been a case of using partnerships with well-established foreign companies for technology transfer, until sufficient expertise and in particular trained manpower was in place for the state to push out the companies and go it alone. And yet, as the example of Curtiss-Wright shows, this transition was not made overnight. The establishment of a flag-carrier (today’s Turkish Airlines) was nonetheless welcomed as an opportunity to introduce Turkey to the world. To this day, Turkish Airlines remains a flag-carrier that likes to wave the flag.

My doctoral research is still underway, and addresses the MPW’s activities in the aviation sector over a longer period, from 1923 down to 1950. I hope to explore the aforementioned “Privileged Companies” and their nationalization in detail in a chapter of my thesis, but also place this narrative in the context of similar transitions in other sectors of the economy, such as railways, utilities (water, electricity) and port companies. Across the board, expropriation accelerated in the 1930s, notably under Ali Çetinkaya, the first Minister of Transport (1939-40). Similar trends can be seen in France, where all private companies were nationalized and merged into a new line, Air France, in 1933, as well as Italy’s Ala Littoria of 1934, discussed above. A study of aviation policy in Britain has spoken of “aviation imperialism”.[6]  In writing the history of civil aviation in Turkey, therefore, it is important to recognize that Ankara was not alone in viewing airlines as a strategic sector, an étatist vehicle, as well as a means of projecting soft power abroad.

Notes

[1] Ercan Haytaoğlu, “Cumhuriyet’in İlk Yıllarında Ticari Havayolu Taşımacılığında İmtiyazlı İlk Şirket: Aero Espresso Italiana (1924-1935)”, Journal of Modern Turkish History 14.28 (2018): 76-109; Feyza Kurnaz Şahin, “Cumhuriyet’in İlk Yıllarında İstanbul-Bükreş Havayolu Hattı Kurulma Çabaları ve İmtiyazı Meselesi”, Journal of the Balkan Research Institute 9.1 (July 2020): 39-79.

[2] Sezer Çıtır, “Türkiye’de Sivil Havacilik Sirketlerinin Faaliyetleri (1923-1933)”, MA thesis, Istanbul University, 2022. See also Ökkeş Kürşad Karacagil and Sezer Çıtır, “Civil Aviation in Türkiye and the Activities of the Lufthansa Company (1928-1933), Journal of Eurasian Inquiries 12.1 (2023).

[3] Mieczyslaw Budek, “Turkish Commercial Aviation”, Journal of Air Law and Commerce 23.4 (Autumn 1956): 386.

[4] The original name of the company was “Compagnie Franco-Roumaine de Navigation Aêrienne”.

[5] Undated contract draft. BCA, Nafia Vekâleti, 8/28/1, lef. 113.

[6] Teresa Crompton, “British Imperial Policy and the Indian Air Route, 1918-1932″, PhD thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2014.

FEATURE IMAGE: ISTANBUL-BELGRADE TIMETABLE, COURTESY LUFTHANSA ARCHIVES.