41. An Airplane Factory in Besiktas
An Airplane Factory in Besiktas
Introductory clip prepared for TASSA'08 (~20 minutes)
About the Director
Mustafa Savas Güvezne has 34 years of experience in directing documentaries. "An Airplane Factory in Besiktas" is his 13th documentary. He was born in Turkey in 1948. After graduating from the Electrical Engineering Department of the Teachers College, he worked as a reporter at a number of magazines and newspapers. In 1974, he became a news cameraman for the Turkish Radio and Televison (TRT). Later, he worked on a number of documentaries that won various national and international awards. STEM Ltd., the production house that he formed in 1986 focused on movies and television programs as well as promotionals and commercials.
| Title | : An Airplane Factory in Besiktas |
| Duration | : 80 minutes |
| Production year | : 2008 |
| Director | : M. Savas Güvezne |
| Music | : Seyithan Uras |
| Language and Subtitle | : Turkish, English |
| Topic | : A perspective on the early years of the Turkish Republic through the portrait of Nuri Demirag, an entrepreneur and a businessman |
As the first Turkish railroad contractor, Nuri Demirag built the largest span of railroads in Turkey. The perfection of his work and the effort he put in his projects earned him the reputation of a legendary hero. The founder of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gave him his last name Demirag which means 'iron network'.
While completing 548Km long Samsun-Erzurum line which included 138 tunnels totaling a 22Km span, he employed on the average 27 thousand workers daily. His accomplishments in building badly needed infrastructure after years of neglect and war devastation made him the pride of the Turkish business world and earned him a substantial fortune. Nuri Demirag was not only the first major entrepreneur of the Turkish Republic but also renown as a personality who promoted self-confidence and self-reliance in Turkish people by engaging Turkish engineers and laborers in challenging projects.
In 1930's, he spearheaded the development of the Turkish civil aviation industry by investing his wealth in building an airplane factory in Besiktas and establishing an airport in Yesilköy, both in Istanbul. Based on an order from the Turkish Air Foundation, the factory designed and manufactured a fleet of airplanes. To encourage young generation's interest in aviation, he established a 'Sky School' to train pilots. This school certified 420 pilots who logged more than 60 thousand flight hours without any accident. A passenger airplane, namely NuD38 designed by the factory received acclaim internationally for the many innovations in design and fabrication as has been recorded in the annals of international civil aviation. These accomplishments unfortunately met with a major setback when the Turkish Air Foundation refused to purchase the planes that it had ordered claiming technical deficiencies. When he attempted to sell the planes internationally, he was denied permission to carry out the sales.
This documentary chronicles the historical events and deliberates on the political reasons behind the impediments that undermined the creation of the Turkish civil aviation enterprise through the accounts of witnesses who knew Nuri Demirag and those who are students of the extraordinary period preceding World War II.