I recognized nearly all the war planes at a glance. In those days we constantly used foreign words like Luftwaffe (the German Air Force) and RAF (the Royal Air Force that fought for Great Britain), but I can’t remember whether today’s Turkish word for airplane, ‘uçak’, had yet been coined. My father’s dictionary just had the old word, ‘tayyare’.
In our early adolescence we began to make the acquaintance of other planes. The Cuban crisis taught us about Soviet MIGs and Ilyushins, while from the Vietnam War we learned about American B-52s. So to our generation, planes were first and foremost war planes.
Then we got to know poetry that spoke of planes, but these were civilian aircraft, not war planes. We knew by heart three lines that Cahit Külebi had penned in memory of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire: “Are there two planes in the skies over Paris, Guillaume? / Are you on board the black one / And do I pilot the white one?”