Turkish Airlines already flies to more countries than any other airline in the world, and now the airline is adding yet another country to its network. Best of all, this is yet another fun fifth freedom option.
In this post:
Turkish Airlines launching flights to Santiago, Chile
Turkish Airlines will soon be launching flights to Chile. The Star Alliance airline will start flying to Santiago (SCL), but it won’t be a nonstop flight from Istanbul (IST). Instead, it’ll be a continuation of one of the carrier’s existing flights to Sao Paulo (GRU).
As of December 12, 2024, Turkish Airlines will launch the following flight 4x weekly:
TK215 Istanbul to Sao Paulo departing 8:35PM arriving 4:15AM (+1 day)
TK215 Sao Paulo to Santiago departing 5:50AM arriving 9:45AM
TK216 Santiago to Sao Paulo departing 11:40AM arriving 3:15PM
TK215 Sao Paulo to Istanbul departing 4:50PM arriving 11:20AM (+1 day)
Turkish Airlines will use an Airbus A350-900 for the route. The entire journey covers a distance of 8,179 miles, with the long haul flight being 6,553 miles, and the tag flight being 1,626 miles.
For what it’s worth, Turkish Airlines currently flies 11x weekly to Sao Paulo. The daily service will continue as before (it actually connects to Buenos Aires), while the 4x weekly service will soon connect to Santiago.
Santiago is now Turkish Airlines’ second furthest destination, in terms of distance from Istanbul, as it’s over 8,000 miles away (the longest is Melbourne, which is over 9,000 miles away, and that’s served via Singapore).
South America has fun fifth freedom flights!
Turkish Airlines’ new flight between Brazil and Chile is a fifth freedom service, meaning passengers can fly with the airline exclusively within South America, which is a fun way to fly. It’s certainly much better than the experience you’ll get on LATAM, or any other local airlines serving the market.
South America has quite a robust network of fifth freedom routes, given the distance between South America and many other points in the world. This allows airlines to serve a couple of destinations with a single long haul flight. Just looking at the southern part of South America, here are some of the routes that come to mind:
- Air Canada, Ethiopian Airlines, SWISS, and Turkish Airlines, all fly from Sao Paulo (GRU) to Buenos Aires (EZE)
- British Airways and Emirates fly from Rio de Janeiro (GIG) to Buenos Aires (EZE)
- KLM flies from Buenos Aires (EZE) to Santiago (SCL)
Bottom line
As of December 2024, Turkish Airlines will launch a new service to Santiago via Sao Paulo. This complements Turkish Airlines’ existing fifth freedom flight from Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires. It’s always cool to see more fifth freedom routes in South America, and this particular route wasn’t previously served by any foreign airlines, so that makes this all the better.
Turkish Airlines is already a massive airline, but the carrier keeps getting bigger, and has huge growth plans.
What do you make of Turkish Airlines launching flights to Sao Paulo?
Amazing that there are four *A carriers who fly from Sao Paulo to BA, but there is very little schedule coordination between them. In particular, United, which from Newark only serves Sao Paulo, should better coordinate to facilitate connections to BA and Santiago.
It may be better now, but I once flew United to Sao Paulo, just missed the AC and Swiss flights to BA. The UA flight was on-time, but arrived after the gates...
Amazing that there are four *A carriers who fly from Sao Paulo to BA, but there is very little schedule coordination between them. In particular, United, which from Newark only serves Sao Paulo, should better coordinate to facilitate connections to BA and Santiago.
It may be better now, but I once flew United to Sao Paulo, just missed the AC and Swiss flights to BA. The UA flight was on-time, but arrived after the gates for those flights closed. The Ethiopian flight was 5 hours later.
It must be quite an ordeal for Y passengers. Seat model (turkish own industry) in TK's 359 is far from perfect and narrowed. Safran seats, like in ET's 359 are so much better for such flights, but SCL is not on ET's radars...
As if you had any other carriers you could still fly on Vladimir...
Long-haul flights in economy are awful regardless of the airline....
This reminds me: EK launched SCL flights via GRU in July 2018, but never resumed SCL after the pandemic, despite launching MEX and BOG in the meantime post-COVID. I’m not counting on SCL to return to the Emirates network.
Great point forgot about the SCL tag — any other not-yet-resumed EK destinations post-COVID? Can’t think of any others. Heard Porto will be relaunched in FY25 with A359
https://aviacionline.com/2024/03/emirates-resumes-flights-to-cambodia-after-four-years/
I’d love to see RGN make a comeback, especially since it operated a tag to...
https://aviacionline.com/2024/03/emirates-resumes-flights-to-cambodia-after-four-years/
I’d love to see RGN make a comeback, especially since it operated a tag to HAN which is now served nonstop. Also in South Asia, I don’t see KBL making a comeback, especially since FZ serves it and the demand from the highly unstable Afghanistan is not enough to justify a 777. (TK relaunched KBL in May with its A330-200s.)
Thanks for the info!
RGN would be wonderful to see again, and I agree about KBL; given the instability there, a whole EK 777 seems unlikely. OPO and EDI should be back with the A350 as well. Wish they would bring back SAW too; used to be less than half an hour's drive to where I needed to go often compared to an hour and a half now. But doubt that will happen with FZ double daily on that route
The 5th freedom flights are cool but often at inconvenient times. Anyone seriously flying to BA from SCL or GRU would want to fly in to AEP and save a bunch of hassle.
TK isn’t leaving enough operational time at GRU or SCL for those turns. Expect those flights to be late late late.
Agree; 90 minute turns 3x in a row is going to be near impossible for them. I’d guess 1h+ late by the end of the run
MEL is further from IST at a great circle distance of 9093mi
@ exzee -- Whoops, totally forgot about that, thanks. Updated the post.
Surely, Turkish Airlines' flights to Melbourne, Australia (MEL) are a greater distance from Istanbul (IST) at over 9,000 miles...
Interesting is that what Turkish had actually promised was Rio and Santiago, two destinations in one go, to compete with Emirates. What went wrong there (IST-GIG-SCL)?
Turkish had also promised, as part of its megalomania, to fly to Asunción this year - what for??
Paraguay has a lot of shady connections to the Middle East (drugs, weapons, smuggling, etc. with Iran and Hezbollah). Ciudad del Este is a big hub for that kind of illicit activity. Lots of interesting articles on it especially Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic (old but good read).
@Tulasi, you expect Genocide J."GOLDBERG" to say something nice about Middle Eastern countries besides your Hometown Israel? Give me a Break! By the way, are you finished Bombing the children?
Whatever your thoughts blaming an entire group for bombing is like saying all Muslims are terrorists.
Yeah, that sounds like dumb reasoning from Tulasi.
GRU - SCL is brutal 5 am flight so it doesn't really help as a 5th freedom unless one is only buying a one way SCL-GRU and not GRU-SCL.
For a business traveler that does not want to sleep in SCL the night before, it's convenient. There's a lot of business traffic between Sao Paulo and Santiago. For those travelers, it's actually the SCL-GRU leg the one that kills your working day.