Photos of airline staff on plane

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

Photos of nearly 18,000 Turkish Airlines employees are placed on a Boeign 737.

Turkish Airlines, the Turkish national flag carrier, has decorated a Boeing 737-800 plane with photographs of 18,000 employees.

The company presented the plane to the press at a ceremony at Istanbul’s Atatürk International Airport yesterday.

The project, backed by Boeing, was the first of its kind anywhere in the world, according to a statement by the airline.

Turkish Airlines has tripled its fleet and capacity over the past eight years, said chairman Hamdi Topçu during the event.

Turkish Airlines carried 5.1 million passengers between January and February 2012, an increase of 19.2 percent over the same period last year, according to a report filed by the company with the Istanbul Stock Exchange (İMKB) yesterday.

Turkish Airlines General Manager Temel Kotil said at the event that acquisition talks with Poland’s LOT airlines could be finalized this month. The firm recently launched flights from Istanbul to Mogadishu, Somalia are receiving a great deal of interest, especially from natives living in Europe, said Şefi Tetik, the local company authority in the African country.