The pilots, fearing recrimination, asked for anonymity, but the head of the Turkish Air Workers union, Atilay Aycin, the then-president of the Turkish Pilots' Association, Tuna Gurel, and the president of the Turkish Cabin Crew Association, Berna Tanyolac, all went on record to corroborate the pilots' accounts. All emphatically agreed that Turkish Airlines' safety had been compromised.

In the article, the pilots claimed that under the new management, pilots were regularly asked to exceed safe numbers of flying hours. Demands to do so, they claimed, came directly from the new senior executives. They complained as well of personnel shortages: new pilots, they said, had been hired en masse but it was debatable whether their training was adequate.

The climate of cronyism and favouritism among the new management, they added, had so demoralised pilots and cabin crews from the old guard that they were "losing their work ethic".

Experienced crew had been forced into retirement, the pilots said, even as the number of aircraft, passengers and destinations was sharply increased; and although many

new employees had been hired, their qualifications were allegedly inadequate.

They charged that many of the new cabin crew, for example, were graduates of religious Imam Hatip schools rather than of technical universities - Imam Hatip schools were, the pilots said, classified as 'trade schools' and the Imam Hatip alumni were therefore 'camouflaged' as trade school graduates. This is no trivial claim, if true: the main responsibility of cabin crew is not to serve meals, but to handle in-flight emergencies or evacuations.

Technicians were given maintenance tasks after two or three hours of training

The president of the Turkish Pilots' Association, Tuna Gurel, claimed that 400 experienced workers had been laid off in the previous year, with 355 of them being forced into retirement - even though the Turkish Airlines fleet had expanded by 25 per cent. In all, 1,500 had been laid off since the AKP-appointed management came to power in 2003 .

"If you ask Turkish Airlines management," said Gurel, "they will tell you that they let 1,500 employees go but hired 2,500 more. But when you look at quality, you know that the hiring does not match the firing." He claimed that technicians who should, in principle, have received two years of hands-on experience before assuming authority for maintenance tasks were now given the job after two or three hours of training.

As the head of the labour union, Gurel has reason to dramatise the putative consequences of layoffs. But disturbingly similar claims have surfaced previously in the Turkish press, also sourced to THY employees. For example, Tempo Dergisi, a serious news magazine belonging to a major media conglomerate, interviewed a technician who claimed to be responsible for engine maintenance: he admitted that he was not licensed to do this job.

Other maintenance workers complained that when they approached their supervisors with concerns about an aircraft, they were told: "Find a way to get this plane airborne. Stamp the documents."

These workers also claimed that manufacturers' guidelines on the