Departure
94%
vs 95% ▼ 1
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen International Airport lies on the Asian side of Istanbul, at Pendik, and serves as the city's secondary international gateway alongside the much larger Istanbul Airport. It is a major commercial hub with twin parallel hard runways, home to AJet and Pegasus Airlines, and named after Sabiha Gökçen, the world's first female fighter pilot.
Sabiha Gökçen International Airport is a large commercial airport on the Asian side of Istanbul, in the district of Pendik, roughly 32 km southeast of the city centre. It is operated as a major hub for AJet and Pegasus Airlines and handles a substantial volume of domestic and international scheduled traffic. For a simulator pilot, it offers the chance to fly into a busy, modern Turkish hub with long parallel runways and a dense schedule of narrow-body jet movements, named in honour of Sabiha Gökçen, adoptive daughter of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the first female fighter pilot in the world.
The airport sits in the Asian part of the transcontinental city of Istanbul, in the Pendik district, about 32 km southeast of the city centre. It functions as Istanbul's secondary international airport, complementing the much larger Istanbul Airport on the European side, some 63 km to the west.
Sabiha Gökçen has two parallel hard-surfaced runways, both lit. The shorter pair, 06L/24R, measures approximately 10,009 to 10,012 feet in length. The longer pair, 06R/24L, measures approximately 11,791 to 11,945 feet. Field elevation is 295 feet. No ILS is recorded for the field.
Published frequencies include ATIS on 128.2 MHz, Clearance Delivery on 126.425 MHz, Ground on 121.75 MHz, and Tower on both 37.877 MHz and 118.8 MHz.
Sabiha Gökçen Airport opened on 8 January 2001 to relieve pressure on Atatürk Airport, which had become too small to cope with rising domestic and international demand. In June 2007 a consortium of Limak Holding, the GMR Group and Malaysia Airport Holding Berhad won the contract to upgrade and maintain the airport, and ground was broken in mid-2008 on an expanded international terminal designed to handle 25 million passengers a year; this new terminal opened on 31 October 2009. Traffic grew rapidly, from 11.2 million passengers in 2010, a 72 percent rise on the previous year, to more than 35 million by 2019. In September 2010 the airport was voted World's Best Airport at the World Low Cost Airlines Congress in London, among other awards received that year. A second runway was inaugurated on 25 December 2023, intended to raise hourly aircraft movement capacity from 40 to 80 and to support future terminal development between the two runways.
Sabiha Gökçen remains one of Turkey's busiest airports, ranked as the country's second-busiest and handling over 48 million passengers in 2025. It serves as the operating base for AJet and Pegasus Airlines and is served by a wide range of international and domestic carriers. The 2023 addition of a second runway has increased movement capacity, supporting continued growth in scheduled operations. As a major international commercial airport, prior permission is required for general aviation and non-scheduled movements.