The Retro A320 was unveiled in December 2005 with "1933 ten beri" (Since 1933) titles on the port side. This aircraft only kept the retro livery a year before leaving the fleet. As most THY planes, it was named afer a Turkish city (Kahramanmaraş in eastern Turkey) and didn't change name after the Retro scheme was applied.
Ten years later the Retro livery was painted again, this time on A330 TC-JNC with the christening name Kushimoto. The original Kushimoto-named plane was a DC-10 in this very same livery.
Kushimoto village in Wakayama prefecture (Japan) is where part of the Turkish crew of the Ottoman frigate Ertuğrul was saved in 1890 after the damaged ship hit rocks and sunk. The accident created a general sympathy for Turkish people in Japan and led to the establishment of a strong basis for which friendship between Turkey and Japan was to later flourish. In 1985 the DC-10 was deployed to rescue 215 Japanese passengers stranded in Tehran during an aviation blockade of the Iran-Iraq war. TC-JNC took part in commemorations 30 years after the flight and 125 years after the Ertuğrul shipwreck.
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