Turkish Airlines Is Moving Its Sydney Flights Off Kuala Lumpur and Onto Singapore

Turkish Airlines will reroute its Istanbul to Sydney service through Singapore instead of Kuala Lumpur from October 26, 2026, according to schedule filings published at the end of July. The change runs through March 27, 2027, and puts both of the carrier’s Australian routes on the same stopover.

The service stays five times a week on the Airbus A350-900. Total journey time, including the stop, sits at roughly 22 hours in each direction.

What changes on October 26

The filings, first surfaced by the schedule-watch site AeroRoutes, keep the same flight numbers and the same aircraft. Only the intermediate stop moves.

Flight	Routing	Departs	Arrives
TK022	Istanbul, Singapore, Sydney	IST 15:20	SYD 19:25 next day
TK023	Sydney, Singapore, Istanbul	SYD 21:35	IST 11:10 next day

Turkish Airlines has flown Istanbul to Melbourne via Singapore Changi since March 2024, so consolidating Sydney there gives the airline one Southeast Asian transit point rather than two.

The move lifts the carrier’s Singapore frequency from 17 to 22 weekly flights and cuts Kuala Lumpur from 19 to 14.

Why the stop moved

A one-stop long-haul route is only partly about the destination. The intermediate airport is a market in its own right, and each leg has to sell on its own.

Putting both Australian services through the same airport also lets the two flights share ground handling, spare parts, standby crew and a single station operation. That is a real cost line on a route flown five and three times a week rather than daily.

There is a commercial dimension too. Turkish Airlines and Singapore Airlines signed a codeshare agreement covering traffic beyond each other’s hubs, and a Singapore transit sits more naturally alongside that than a Kuala Lumpur one.

Why it still is not nonstop

Istanbul to Sydney is about 9,300 miles (15,000 km) in a straight line. Flown nonstop it would rank among the two or three longest scheduled flights in the world, and it is beyond what an A350-900 can do commercially with a full cabin and a normal payload.

The airline has been open about wanting to close that gap. Chairman Ahmet Bolat has said repeatedly that Sydney would be the first Australian city to go nonstop once the carrier’s Airbus A350-1000 aircraft arrive, saving passengers roughly two hours. Turkish ordered 15 of the type as part of a 220-aircraft Airbus deal.

That is the same aircraft family Qantas is using to open its own ultra-long-range flying, and the Australian carrier’s A350-1000ULR test flights are a useful measure of what the airframe actually delivers on this kind of sector. The difference is that Qantas specified a modified, extra-tank version for the job.

Until Turkish has aircraft capable of the full run, the honest read of this schedule change is a network tidy-up, not a step toward the nonstop. It moves the stop to a better airport for the airline; it does not remove it.