The navy’s main air station is named after an airman. Cengiz Topel was born in Trabzon on 2 September 1934, according to DefenceTurk, graduated from the Kuleli military high school and the Military Academy, trained as a pilot in Canada and in 1961 joined 112 Squadron at Eskişehir. He was promoted captain in 1963.

On 8 August 1964, during the fighting around Tylliria in north-western Cyprus, he led four F-100s from Eskişehir against Greek Cypriot positions. English Wikipedia says his aircraft was hit by 40 mm anti-aircraft fire from a National Guard emplacement; he ejected near Peristeronari and was taken by Greek Cypriot soldiers. What happened next is disputed. Greek Cypriot authorities said he had been injured and died of his wounds after hospital treatment. DefenceTurk’s account says he was tortured, citing an autopsy by Turkish and Danish physicians. Wikipedia itself says it is not certain what happened in custody, only that he did not survive.

His body was returned on 12 August 1964 and buried in Istanbul on 14 August. Turkey has named streets, schools, a hospital in northern Cyprus and this air station after him.

Turkish naval flying is older than the station. In June 1914 the Ottoman navy opened its Naval Aircraft School (Bahriye Tayyare Mektebi) at San Stefano, today’s Yeşilköy on the Sea of Marmara, where the army had begun flying two years earlier. English Wikipedia’s history of the Ottoman air squadrons counts four aircraft at the school in August 1914 and, at the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, three naval seaplane companies of four aircraft each.

What links that school to the Republic’s naval aviation is not documented in the sources checked: between the wars Turkish military flying was concentrated in the army and then the air force. The thread picks up again at Cengiz Topel with the Trackers.

For three decades Cengiz Topel meant Trackers. English Wikipedia says the Turkish Navy received ex-US Navy S-2E Trackers under the Military Assistance Program and flew them from this base from the 1960s, later adding retired S-2As from the Netherlands, which the Dutch called the S-2N. The twin-engined Tracker was a carrier-born submarine hunter; in Turkish service it flew from land, watching the Turkish Straits, the Black Sea and the Aegean.

The end was not graceful. The Turkish Trackers were retired in 1994, Wikipedia says, after a series of accidents caused by the advanced age and fatigue of the airframes. How many the navy flew, and how many were lost, could not be confirmed for this page.

After the Trackers the station’s business became helicopters and turboprop patrol aircraft. The navy’s S-70B-28 Seahawks numbered 24 in November 2021, when Rear Admiral Alper Yeniel, the Naval Air Commander, set out his inventory at a seminar: six P-235 (CN-235) and, by then, two P-72 patrol aircraft, nine TB2 drones and an Aksungur. The P-72s, ATR 72-600s converted by Turkish Aerospace with Link 16 and the Mk 54 torpedo, were delivered from December 2020 to 2023.

In early 2022 the Land Forces handed over ten AH-1W SuperCobras, serials TCB 80 to TCB 89, the navy’s first attack helicopters, for the new flagship TCG Anadolu. DefenceTurk wrote in March 2026 that the Seahawk and the AB-212 had been the backbone of the force for many years and that the fleet’s age had become a problem. Where each type is based day to day is not published.

The patrol aircraft have had real work. English Wikipedia says the navy’s CN-235 maritime patrol versions flew heavy patrols over the Black Sea after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and repeatedly spotted drifting sea mines, helping to clear them. Rear Admiral Yeniel also announced in 2021 that the SuperCobras would be the Turkish Navy’s first attack helicopters, a role the navy had never had before.

Kocaeli, one of Turkey’s most industrial provinces, had no airport of its own until the navy shared its runway. English Wikipedia says the station opened to public air traffic in 2011 as Cengiz Topel Airport, IATA code KCO, and that Pegasus Airlines flies seasonally to Trabzon — Topel’s home city. Military and civil traffic share the single 3,000-metre runway.