Hello Yasar,
Thank you for your reply and the invoice.
I have written a News articles for UCB’s website, it is yet to be published (this should happen soon) so I thought I would send you a copy here:
UCB final year Aviation & Airport Management Students go to Istanbul, Turkey.
What a successful and highly educational trip we have just had! Myself, 2 other members of staff and 61 final year Airport & Aviation Management students went to find out all about Istanbul, its tourism and especially its thriving aviation industry. Our trip included a tour around the brand new Istanbul Airport (IST), WOW what a feat of meticulous engineering, the sense of space is immense. We conferenced with The Chief Planning Officer for IST who talked us through some of the finer details of the airports development and its commitment to ‘best practice’. He shared the airports successes so far, along with its plans for the next few years, we as academics got to see how best practice, with careful planning can be achieved in a very short space of time. The New IST was developed in only 42 months from inception and is now fully operational. We were able to peruse, never before seen, images of the construction process with stories to accompany them. Snippets like the sustainable credentials of the development and the relative examples of the sheer scope of this total plan. For example the size of the new Terminal’s roof some 450,000m3, is equivalent to 14 x Rome’s Colosseum surface area! News also broke, while we were there, that IST had been awarded ‘Airport of the Year’, our celebration for IST was deafening!
We also had talks from highly esteemed ex Turkish Airlines executives, who are now private consultants and university lecturers in their own right, the stories and experiences that they were able and happy to share with the students were a delight to hear. The educational visits continued with a trip to Ayjet Flight School, a private pilot school, where the Principal and head lecturer informed us of their training courses and allowed us to visit their Simulators, where cadet pilots were building up their flying hours. Our final educational visit was to the Turkish Airlines Aviation Academy where we had an audience with a host of educators from short courses to MA’s, this was especially enlightening in terms of the Continued Professional Development that Turkish Airlines offers to its employees. UCB Students where very interested in the opportunities that Turkish Airlines have for employment.
On top of all of that we obviously visited some of Istanbul’s top attractions including: The Topkapi Palace Museum, Hagia Sophia Museum, The Blue Mosque, The Basilica Cistern, the Grand & Spice Bazzar’s and of course a boat trip along the Bosphorous. We were tired by the end but the experience will stay with us all forever. Special thanks go to our UK Tour operator TravelBound and our wonderful guides from Esendal Tourism in Istanbul, for a fabulous week, full of aviation visits and historical facts regarding the rich and diverse history of Turkey. We hope to be back with more students soon.
I will send you the URL once it goes live.
I have written a recommendation to Travel Bound too. Would you also like a short bio to go on your marketing material?
Many thanks again
Helen
