25/02: Turkish Airlines aircraft of the tragic Amsterdam incident

In light of Wednesday's tragic incident involving a Turkish Airlines passenger aircraft at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, I went digging through my sizable cache of travel photos. I would like to preface by extending my condolences to the families of those who lost their lives.

Here's the photo of interest that I was seeking:


The above is a tarmac shot, taken at Istanbul's Ataturk airport in August 2008, of the boarding of my flight to Astana, Kazakhstan. (Why I was going to KZ will be left to the subject of another blog post, I'm afraid!) The aircraft is a Boeing 737-800 with winglets (not shown in the above snapshot), identical to the ill-fated ship.

Of particular interest is the registration number of the aircraft pictured above. The posted picture is obviously low-quality, yet in my high-quality version I can just make out the first four characters of the registration number, printed below the aircraft's tail and just forward of the horizontal stabilizer; these are: TC-JG. The last character, hazier, appears to be either a D or an E. I was, of course, curious about how the registration number of the Amsterdam aircraft compares, and I was surprised to learn that is it TC-JGE. It is possible, therefore, that I journeyed on the same aircraft some months ago -- a humbling consideration, indeed.