The aeroplane was a few months old. It was empty except for the three people flying it, on a short hop across the Mediterranean to collect passengers in Libya. It was a routine positioning flight, the kind that happens a thousand times a morning across the business aviation world.

Shortly after the wheels touched down at Misrata, the aircraft was off the pavement and burning.

All three got out.

Nobody agrees on what actually happened

This is the honest state of the story a day later, and it is worth setting out plainly rather than picking the version that reads best.

The Aviation Safety Network logs the event as a runway excursion of the veer-off type: the aircraft departed the paved surface to the left roughly 1,400 metres past the threshold of runway 15, was steered back toward the runway, crossed the shoulder about 500 metres further on, and the landing gear collapsed.

Libya Herald, reporting from Tripoli, describes something different: an overrun during an attempted emergency landing. It also records two early and explicitly unconfirmed claims circulating locally, that the aircraft had an engine problem, and that it landed from the wrong direction.

Those are not small differences. A veer-off is a loss of directional control during the landing roll. An overrun is running out of runway ahead of you. An emergency landing implies something had already gone wrong before the aeroplane ever touched the ground, which would make the excursion a consequence rather than the event itself. Until somebody with access to the wreckage and the recorders says otherwise, all three descriptions are in play.

The part that went right

Three people were on board: the pilot, the co-pilot and a flight attendant, all Turkish nationals. There were no passengers, because the whole purpose of the flight was to go and get them.

Airport fire and rescue reached the aircraft, put the fire out, and got all three clear. Libya’s Tripoli Transport Ministry said afterwards that the crew had been treated and that the information available indicated they were in good health.

Business jet fires are not forgiving. A Citation Latitude carries its fuel in the wings, immediately outboard of a cabin with one main door on the left and an overwing emergency exit on the right. When the gear collapses and a wing touches the ground, the margin between an evacuation and a fatal accident is measured in seconds and in how fast somebody gets a door open.

A nearly new aeroplane, and who it was waiting for

TC-AKF was a 2026 airframe, a jet still inside its first heavy-maintenance cycle with an engine programme barely started. Akfen Holding has confirmed the aircraft belongs to the group and is operated by BKNJET Aviation Co, the Istanbul charter company generally known as BKN Jet.

The detail that has travelled furthest is the owner. Turkish media identified him as Hamdi Akin, whom Forbes places among the ten wealthiest people in Turkiye. It is also the least useful fact in the file. An aircraft does not care who holds the title.

More interesting is who the jet was going to Misrata to collect. Libya Herald reports it was due to fly three Libyan political figures to Turkey, among them Mohamed Zoubi, brother of the Tripoli-based Undersecretary of Defence Abdelsalam Zoubi. None of them had boarded. In a country where charter aviation is substantially about moving officials in and out, that is context rather than coincidence.

The flight originated at Istanbul Ataturk, an airport most people assume closed years ago. It did close to scheduled airline traffic when Istanbul Airport opened in 2019, but it remains busy with business and general aviation, which is why a charter positioning flight was leaving it at a quarter to six in the morning.

Two runway accidents in eight days

This is the second destructive runway accident to make international news in just over a week. On 6 September a Boeing 767 operated by 21 Air for Amazon left the end of a runway at Miami International and killed five people on the road beyond it.

Mechanically the two have little in common, and the human outcomes could hardly be further apart. What they share is the reminder that the landing roll is not the part of the flight where the risk ends. Runway excursions remain the most common category of accident in commercial aviation, and they are overwhelmingly survivable, right up until they are not.

Misrata got the survivable version, and the airport was back open by ten that night.

Sources: Libya Herald, Aviation Safety Network, Aviation News EU, Turkiye Today, Aviation24.be, FL360aero.