SunExpress

Is SunExpress safe?

Yes. In more than 35 years of flying holidaymakers between Europe and Türkiye, SunExpress has never had a fatal accident and has never written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary an aircraft, according to the Aviation Safety Network. The catch is a recent cluster of landing gear problems: one 737 broke a main gear leg while taxiing at Antalya in February 2026, and another damaged its nose gear landing at Gaziantep that June. Neither caused injuries, and no cause has been published for either. We score SunExpress 84, with medium confidence because Türkiye publishes few investigation reports.

SunExpress is a joint venture of Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa, based in Antalya. It holds its own Turkish air operator certificate and flies under its own XQ code, so this page scores SunExpress alone. Its parents' accidents do not count here, and its own do not count on their pages.

What has gone wrong at SunExpress?

The accident record is clean of the events that matter most. What ASN does list are ground accidents in which a 737 was badly damaged but no one was hurt:

• Prague, June 2010. A SunExpress 737-800 taxiing for Antalya clipped the tailplane of a waiting Lufthansa A321 with its winglet. Czech investigators found the SunExpress crew had not kept a safe distance from the parked aircraft.
• Cologne/Bonn, September 2022. A ground vehicle punctured the fuselage of a 737-800 below a passenger door. The aircraft was repaired and back in service in December.
• Antalya, February 2026. The left main landing gear leg of a 737-800 broke as it taxied to the runway for a flight to Gaziantep. All 181 people on board were unhurt, and the flight left five and a half hours late on another aircraft.

These events count against the airline lightly. A broken gear leg at taxi speed is still a serious failure, though, and its cause matters more than the outcome. We have found no published finding yet.

The 2026 landing gear events

Four months after Antalya, on 22 June 2026, flight XQ1781 from Stuttgart burst a tyre after touching down at Gaziantep. Türkiye's transport ministry said the nose landing gear was damaged and that all 186 passengers and six crew left the aircraft safely. The airport closed for a while so the runway could be cleared and checked, and the ministry said a review had begun.

Two gear failures on different aircraft in one year do not prove a maintenance problem, and the ministry has not said what it found. The Antalya failure counts under accidents; Gaziantep and an earlier event are why serious incidents score 74 rather than the low 80s of airlines such as Jet2. On 4 October 2024, a new 737 MAX 8 climbing out of Izmir for Diyarbakır stopped its climb at 12,000 feet when the crew reported a control problem. The airline said the elevator was "not jammed but restricted", and the aircraft landed back at Izmir about an hour after take-off. Older events are minor: a nose tyre burst at Paderborn in October 2015 sent a 737 briefly onto the grass at about 110 knots before it rolled back to the runway.

How new is the SunExpress fleet?

Middle of the range. SunExpress flies only Boeing 737s, 86 of them in October 2026 according to aeroTELEGRAPH. Since 2024 it has been taking 737 MAX 8s from its Boeing order: 19 had arrived by December 2025 and four more in January 2026. The rest of the fleet is 737-800s, a generation older and built without the MAX family's newer engines. SunExpress does not publish an average fleet age, so we score from the type mix.

Fleet renewal has also slowed. In October 2026 the airline dropped its target of 150 aircraft by 2033 and now plans growth of four to five percent a year; 11 more MAX aircraft are due in 2027 and the first 737 MAX 10 in 2028. Some new jets may replace old ones rather than add to the fleet, which would lower the average age faster.

What about SunExpress Deutschland?

SunExpress Deutschland was a separate airline with its own German certificate, flying from German airports. It was grounded in April 2020 when the pandemic stopped travel, and its shareholders agreed to close it on 23 June 2020; about 1,200 jobs went. We do not count its record here, because it flew as its own airline under German oversight. For the record, German investigators looked into two cabin crew injuries on its flights in 2012, one from hard braking on a taxiway at Düsseldorf and one in turbulence near Hof. Neither damaged an aircraft.

Who oversees SunExpress?

Türkiye's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (SHGM) certifies SunExpress, as it does Pegasus and Turkish Airlines. Türkiye holds FAA Category 1FAA IASAThe US FAA's check of whether a country's aviation regulator meets ICAO standards. Category 1 means it does; Category 2 means it does not.More in the glossary, no Turkish airline is on the EU Air Safety ListEU Air Safety ListThe European Commission's list of airlines banned or restricted from flying in EU airspace because they do not meet international safety standards.More in the glossary, and SunExpress is IOSA-registeredIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary through its IATA membership. The weak point is the same for all three: Türkiye's accident board publishes few reports, and rarely in English, so outsiders learn little about why things went wrong.

Flying SunExpress: practical points

• Expect a 737 MAX or a 737-800. You cannot choose, and the type makes no practical difference to your safety.
• Plan for summer peaks. Antalya handles huge traffic on summer weekends, and delays after a technical problem can run to hours, as at Antalya in February 2026.
• Check the operator on package holidays. Tour operators sell SunExpress seats alongside Condor, Marabu and others; the airline on your booking is the one that flies you.

How we scored it

No fatal accident or hull lossHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary in more than 35 years gives an accident record of 93, and FAA Category 1FAA IASAThe US FAA's check of whether a country's aviation regulator meets ICAO standards. Category 1 means it does; Category 2 means it does not.More in the glossary oversight with IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary gives 80. The 2026 Gaziantep gear damage and the 2024 elevator event hold incidents at 74, and a fleet that is still mostly 737-800s scores 76. Overall 84, above its parent Turkish Airlines (77) and Pegasus (72), and close to Condor (85), a rival on the same holiday routes.