Does Pegasus count as a European airline? This might sound like a silly question that doesn’t really matter, but it’s still fun to ponder. If there was any doubt before, that is now erased with the airline agreeing to buy Czech Airlines and Smartwings. It clearly has some very large ambitions beyond its Turkish borders.
Pegasus is a large low-cost carrier based in Istanbul. That makes it European, right? Well, not really. The airline’s main base of operations is Istanbul’s secondary Sabiha Gökçen airport (SAW). As an aside, Sabiha Gökçen was the world’s first female combat pilot and was a general bad-ass who deserves to have her name on an airport… but I digress.
SAW — along with the airline’s headquarters — is located half an hour’s drive east of the Bosphorus, firmly on the Asian continent. The airport saw about half as many departures at the main Istanbul airport this year, but Pegasus was responsible for more than 60 percent of those departures with about 230 per day on average. Turkish Airlines’s subsidiary AJet is number two at the airport with about 120 daily departures, and it seems to exist primarily to fight Pegasus.
This year, Pegasus is celebrating its 20th year in business, and SAW has always been the airline’s most important airport. But the ranking of other bases has shifted over time, especially since the pandemic when Antalya has taken center stage.
Pegasus Annual Departing Seats by Top Airports (Excluding SAW)
Data via Cirium
Today, Pegasus continues to be an important low-cost carrier in the region, but each of the airline’s 630 daily flights and 135,000 seats tough Türkiye on at least one end. It flies 127 airplanes — mostly A320 and A321neos — and it has an order for another 43 of those plus 100 737-10 MAX aircraft. The network stretches from Oslo and Helsinki in the north to Almaty in the east, Jeddah in the south, and Lisbon in the west. You know what, just take a look:
Pegasus December 2025 route map via Cirium
So where is Pegasus biggest outside of its home country? The largest station is London/Stansted, but that is quickly followed by Dusseldorf, Köln, Moscow/Vnukovo, Berlin, Vienna, Stuttgart, Munich, Tblisi, and Frankfurt.
You may notice that on this top 10 list, six are German cities plus one is in Austria. It’s that central European area which seems to be a sweet spot, so perhaps it’s not a huge surprise that when Pegasus decided to grow, it opted to start with Central Europe and an acquistion of Czech Airlines and Smartwings.
But wait, didn’t Czech fail? Yes it did, well, sort of. Smartwings owned the airline, and when Smartwings decided to shut Czech down and consolidate under a single operating certificate, that was the end of Czech. Today, Czech has become the name of the holding company that sits over Smartwings. Hopefully that helps clear things up.
Smartwings is largely focused on Prague, but it does some Warsaw and Katowice in Poland as well as Bratislava in Slovakia. It also does a ton of charter work to far-flung places. Here’s some semblance of the airline’s December route map excluding the wildest of charters.
Smartwings December 2025 route map via Cirium
By my count, Smartwings has 47 airplanes, mostly B737s with a handful of them MAXs. But it doesn’t seem to have much if anything on order. I suppose this is one reason that Pegasus likes what it sees there… it has a place it can put some of those airplanes in its existing large order.
Beyond that, it’s hard to see exactly what Pegasus is hoping to acheive here. Yes, they are both low-cost carriers with similar commercial models. But the release itself doesn’t really give us many clues.
With this acquisition, Pegasus Airlines aims to combine the experience and resources of both carriers to create an organization ready for the future, offering passengers a wider network and affordable fares. Following the acquisition, both airlines will draw on their shared expertise and build on each other’s strengths.
What? That means nothing. We do know that they will be operated as separate brands, so perhaps this is Pegasus’s attempt to create an IAG-style holding company model where it can just get efficiencies on the back-end. I don’t know that there are really all that many synergies to be had from a customer perspective.
It’s likely that this quote from the Smartwings co-founder gives us the truth. “We take great pride in having successfully established and grown Czech Airlines and Smartwings with limited financial resources and without the external support that most airlines typically receive from their respective governments.”
Now, the hope must be that it can get filled with cash to push forward on a true growth strategy which it couldn’t afford on its own. That’s good news for the airline which is only number two in its home market behind Ryanair. It’s going to need all the help it can get.
