Tabriz, Iran, to Sanliurfa, Turkey

31 May - 2 June 2008

A beautiful flight, past mountains, lakes and Mount Ararat

Our handling agent Mr. Balalian from Safiran picked us up at our hotel at 7:30 as we were aiming for a 9 a.m. departure. Although we had a handling agent who ought to know the rules for parking, landing and navigation fees by heart, we still finished up arguing for half an hour about whether we should pay international rates or domestic rates which are only 23% of the international rates. We finished up with a compromise where we paid full rate for the landing and navigation and domestic rate for parking for a total of US$ 135.
When we were already in the aircraft and had received start-up clearance, Mr. Balalian suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to call the immigration people to get our passports stamped and, more important, register our departure in their computers. So we trotted back to the terminal where the flight plan was delayed for 45 minutes as the immigration officer had to come from town. We finally took off about an hour later than planned.
Although we were flying VFR to avoid complying with the high minimum IFR altitudes (FL150 to 170), Ankara refused to accept our flight plan at FL125 and asked us to file FL165 from the FIR boundary at BONAM. As we had almost 12 hours of cheap Iranian fuel on board our climb rate was very slow above FL120. After lengthy discussions on the radio with Teheran, Ankara finally accepted us at FL145 where we had a 30 to 40 knot headwind. But it was a smooth ride and beautiful scenery with mountains and lakes and we even saw 5166 m Mount Ararat in the distance.
Our arrival in Sanliurfa went smoothly although we initially suspected the friendly guy from the operations office to be a handling agent, but it soon became clear that our fears were unfounded. British citizens need a visa stamp for Turkey which you can normally buy at any border crossing. However Sanliurfa (Gap) is a brand new airport of entry, and we were told that they do not yet have the authority to provide these visa stamps. They soon found a loophole in the regulations and we were both allowed to enter Turkey as air crew. The security people then needed some time to check our clearance, which according to the AIP we don’t need as the aircraft is registered in an ECAC country. We profited from this to have lunch in a bar at the airport washed down with the best beer we had had in over a week.
After arriving at our charming hotel in town, Beyzade Konak, we went to see Özcan Aslan of Harran-Nemrut tours and organized a trip to Mt Nemrut by car for tomorrow and a trip to Harran the day after. We then had dinner in a restaurant recommended by Mr. Aslan and planned to celebrate Angela’s birthday for the second time - this time with a bottle of wine. But alas, it turned out that no restaurants in town (except one) serve alcohol. Never mind, at least the dinner was nice.