Page 235 - Turkiye'de_Ulastirma

Now our goal is to increase the passenger capacity of our airports to 386 million passengers /
year until 2023 and to ensure that each city has an airport that is maximum 1 hour away from its
center. Moreover we plan to double Turkish civilian airline transport fleet by establishing a structure
of 750 planes where 200 are regional planes. I believe that our airline sector that has constantly
develops will be a positive driving force for our tourism potential and growing economy, and will
be the largest airway center of the region with its developed transportation corridor.

SAILOR COUNTRY, SAILOR PEOPLE

Our country, whose sea border is triple of its land border in length, is a maritime country before
everything else. With the regulations we issued and investments we made, we took steps towards
making our identity as ‘sailor country, sailor people’ functional again. Because in this age where
oceans separate continents and where the largest load for international trade is carried by seaway
in the most secure and cheap manner, it would be impossible to not attach importance to seaway.
As of 2003, Turkey, whose one out of each four ships were held at the international harbors before,
freed itself from this difficult position and became a White Flag Country. And thanks to the special
consumption tax (ÖTV) we cancelled, we provided a support over 3 billion 100 million TL to our
sailors.

And by freeing our shipbuilding industry from the jam of Tuzla Region, we spread it to our
shores equally. By increasing our production capacity 7 times, we made Turkey a world brand in
shipbuilding sector. Our shipyards increased to the 6th place based on number of ships with 81
ships and to the 11th place based on tonnage of ships with 633 thousand dwt in world new ship
orders. Our shipyards reached a total export volume of 13 billion dollars by delivering 4.3 billion dwt
ships within the last decade.

With the improvement of the harbors, Turkey entered into the league of countries that have
a name in the cruise tourism. While the number of cruise ships that visited our harbors was 821
in 2002, it reached 1,685 ships by increasing more than two times. And while the number of
passengers was 332 thousand 702 in 2002, the number of passengers, now, increased to 2 million

235