Ali Cavit Çelebioğlu (1926 - 1982)

Ali Cavit Çelebioğlu was born in the town of Gönen in 1926. After serving as a pilot and instructor in the Turkish Air Force, he decided to study law. He graduated from the Ankara Faculty of Law in 1961 and holds a doctorate in the field.

Çelebi Ground Handling Incorporated was founded by Ali Cavit Çelebioğlu in 1958 as Turkey's first privately-owned ground handling company.

The Company created by Ali Cavit Çelebioğlu (who was himself a pilot) at a time when the air transport industry in Turkey was still at the developmental stage, commenced operations in Ankara.

At the outset, the Company employed only a few people, had very little equipment and the scope of its services involved little more than making it possible for aircraft to take off on time. In those years, commercial aircraft in Turkey were small and propeller-driven and were allowed to taxi right up to the terminal building. Passengers boarded and disembarked using the planes' own boarding stairs. As technology advanced over the years however, it was likely that aircraft would grow larger in size, that passenger capacities would increase, and that the number of flights would multiply-all of which meant that airline companies would be in increasingly greater need of ground handling services.

It was Ali Cavit Çelebioğlu's vision that enabled him to foresee these developments well in advance of anyone else. Heading a team that he personally trained himself, he began providing ground handling services at Ankara's Esenboğa airport, thereby laying the foundations of what has become Çelebi Ground Handling today.