Pegasus Proceeds With Fleet Growth, Eyes New Terminal At Main Hub

AMSTERDAM—Turkish LCC Pegasus Airlines is pushing ahead with its fleet growth, expecting a further six Airbus A321neos to arrive in its fleet by the end of 2024, and nine in 2025.

Compared to some other airlines, Pegasus is not suffering as badly from delivery delays, its CEO Güliz Öztürk said.

“We have delays, but these delays have been manageable for us, and we don’t have the engine issue because we’re using CFM engines,” Öztürk said in an interview at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam Oct. 9.

At the end of September, the airline had 112 aircraft, with an average age of 4.5 years, and Pegasus will be receiving another six A321neos, bringing its fleet to 118 by the end of 2024. Ten of the type have already arrived in the fleet this year.

Looking further ahead, nine more will arrive in 2025 and a further 58 in total are due to join the fleet by the end of 2029.

The carrier still has nine Boeing 737s in its fleet and plans to keep them. “Post-COVID, we saw a very fast traffic recovery; the demand boost in Turkey was earlier than in many other countries,” Öztürk said.

While the carrier can keep those Boeing aircraft—which it owns—indefinitely, it has no current plans to add more Boeing aircraft, Öztürk said.

Pegasus has been launching new destinations, with flights to and from Seville, Spain, starting in September; Bremen, Germany, starting from October; and plans for an Ankara-Copenhagen service from November. The airline carried 24.7 million passengers in January-August 2024.

The carrier plans to continue growth across the strategic areas of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and internally in Turkey, even if the current situation in the Middle East is complicated.

Israel flights have been canceled since last year and flights to Lebanon are canceled until the end of October. The carrier has managed to redeploy the capacity elsewhere.

“It’s very difficult to make a projection on how this will continue,” Ozturk said. “We are working on scenarios; our hope is that peace will be restored as soon as possible, and the world will be in a calmer situation. If it continues like this, we will have plan B and plan C.”

Pegasus, which is based at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport, sees growth there being helped by the opening in December 2023 of a second runway. But Ozturk told a panel discussion at the event that the new constraint at the airport in terms of growth is now terminal capacity, which is “a bottleneck,” with passenger flow close to the 41-42 million maximum.

“There will be some projects to use the current terminal’s capacity but that’s limited,” Öztürk said. “There is a project discussed right now of constructing a second terminal, we’re closely following it, and we’re in close contact with the authorities.”

Despite Pegasus having low costs compared to many other carriers, Öztürk noted that rising costs including fuel—around 35-38% of its overall costs—and labor are putting pressure on the industry overall. The airline has hedged around 50% of its fuel needs this year and plans to hedge the same amount for next year. Pegasus is also making use of the OpenAirlines fuel efficiency platform to track fuel consumption.

While aircraft utilization is high at 12.6 hr., Ozturk said Pegasus is looking into how it can be increased.

“Capacity management is important,” Ozturk told Aviation Week. “We have a diversified approach. We are using Sabiha Gokcen as the main hub, but we use other hubs in Turkey. We run 20 aircraft out of Antalya, the second biggest hub. Antalya is a bit a seasonal destination but compared to pre-COVID periods we have managed to utilize some of our capacity also in winter out of Antalya.”

Antalya’s climate in the off-peak months of March, April, October and November makes it attractive for leisure travelers and spreading out demand more evenly across the year, reducing seasonality, helps the carrier’s operations, Öztürk said, noting however that summer peaks remain strong.