Come fly to me.

I've been to Bodrum airport 3 times this week and each time I relished the easy journey to and from town.  It has not always been so. When I first arrived, the nearest airport to Bodrum was a military base on the North side of Izmir. Advertised in the holiday brochures as 5 hours from Bodrum; in reality the journey took 7 hours. The roads were narrow with very few dual carriageways and there were plenty of ancient lorries and tractors to get stuck behind. We also had to drive through Izmir's marshy wetlands and its accompanying aroma of raw sewage; which was always a talking point in a coach full of first-timers to Turkey. Luckily for the poor reps, Adnan Menderes airport soon opened 18 km South of Izmir, cutting over an hour off the journey to Bodrum. Dalaman got an airport soon afterwards. Operating out of a glorified shed for the first year, it speedily acquired a modern (for the eighties) glass and steel structure. But, still 3 hours from Bodrum in brochure speak, i.e on a night run with a driver who should have been working for McLaren.  Rumours of a Bodrum airport circulated for years. The yearned for crock of gold that would bring untold riches to the peninsula.  In 1987, Fuat Imsık opened the first private airport in Turkey,  35 kms from Bodrum. At last we all rejoiced...until we tried it out. The runway was so short that planes had to come over the hills and belly-flop onto the runway. Not for the faint hearted.  As travel agents, we had a deluded idea to run trips to Pamukkale by private plane. On the inaugural flight, Mr. Imsık insisted on coming with us.  He also called the press who wanted to film us taking off and landing....and taking off and landing again and ... you get the picture. Pity the press photographers didn't get their pictures the first time.  It was the scariest flight experience of my life so the Pamukkale idea was abandoned and I never flew at Imsık again.

Bodrum finally got its own airport in 1997.

It's third terminal building is well on the way to completion.