September 19, 2026 marks 50 years since the crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 452, one of the deadliest accidents in Turkish civil aviation. The Aviation Safety Network records 154 people on board and 154 deaths.

The Boeing 727-2F2 registered TC-JBH, named Antalya, was on a domestic flight from Istanbul-Yeşilköy to Antalya. It took off at 22:45. The aircraft struck a hillside near Isparta, about 100 kilometres north of its destination, around 23:15.

ASN reports that after the Afyon VOR the crew requested descent and, at 23:11, reported Antalya city lights and a long boulevard, asking for a direct approach to runway 36. Impact occurred at about 1,130 metres elevation. The archive’s interpretation is that lights of a road near Isparta were taken for the Antalya boulevard.

The event is classed as controlled flight into terrain: the aircraft was functioning but hit the ground. We do not reconstruct cockpit dialogue. The figure of 154 occupants follows the ASN record; other compilations mention 155, which does not replace the technical archive.

The accident happened when ground-proximity warning and precision navigation lacked the coverage of later systems. The development of GPWS and then EGPWS reduced the risk of such cases, according to Flight Safety Foundation initiatives.

Commemoration focuses on the victims and on safety lessons, without crash-site imagery and without assigning blame to a single person in the absence of the full official report.

Image: Boeing 727 TC-JBH (Turkish Airlines) at London Heathrow, 29 October 1975 / Fergus Abraham / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. The same airframe before the accident, not wreckage. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: Accident Boeing 727-2F2 TC-JBH, 19 September 1976 | Aviation Safety Network; Controlled Flight Into Terrain | Flight Safety Foundation.