In recent years, Turkey has carefully followed developments in the aviation sector with many aviation projects and investments and has carried out a sound cooperation with international civil aviation organizations, in particular with ICAO by providing secondees and experts to regional supporting projects and by implementing the ICAO SARPs.
All these improvements brought not only a substantial increase in the number of airports, passengers and air traffic in Turkey, but also the membership of Turkey to the ICAO Council.
As secondees from Turkey in the EUR/NAT Office, we have the opportunity to clearly understand the importance and responsibilities of ICAO in the international civil aviation field. We also found ICAO both providing all aviation partners the most effective ways to increase safety, capacity and efficiency, and improving their awareness in various ways.
During our work in the EUR/ NAT Office, we constantly witnessed ICAO’s productive and effective collaboration with States, international organizations and the industry.
In the Paris Office of ICAO, in addition to having the privilege and pleasure of working within a team composed of several well qualified specialists in various areas of civil aviation coming from different countries and cultures, we have also been able to get the chance to look at the aviation issues from a larger perspective.
Ultimately, we would like to present our gratitude to DHMI (Turkish ANSP), SHGM (Turkish CAA) and ICAO for providing us with this great opportunity.
This article was originally written for the ICAO EUR/NAT Office’s Newsletter (Issue 1) on May 2017. A full list of their newsletters can be found here.