On 30 November 2007, the aircraft operating the flight – a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 which Atlasjet had leased from World Focus Airlines just five months before – crashed in the vicinity of Keçiborlu between the villages of Yenitepe and Çukurören while on approach, approximately 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) west of the destination airport.

[1] The aircraft had initially been deployed to service at Reno Air in September 1994 where it was operated until August 1999, until its merger with American Airlines where it then served until March 2001.

She was accompanied by five other scientists traveling to attend a conference at Süleyman Demirel University in Isparta regarding the Turkish Accelerator Center Project.

The takeoff and climb out from Istanbul were uneventful.Twenty-seven minutes into the flight, Captain Özdemir told air traffic control (ATC) that they were approaching Isparta airport using VHF omnidirectional range,[11] which is a type of short-range radio navigation system that enables aircraft to determine their position and stay on course; the rather small airport which serves mainly domestic flights was not equipped with the more sophisticated instrument landing system.

This however returned no results, and the ATC officially declared the aircraft missing and search and rescue efforts led by the Turkish Gendarmerie were initiated.

Due to the prevalent darkness and the mountainous terrain, initial ground operations proved difficult so the Turkish Air Force dispatched a helicopter equipped with thermal cameras in order to scour the presumed crash site and locate the aircraft.

[18][19] Immediately after the crash, Atlasjet's CEO Tuncay Doğaner assured in a press conference that "the accident was caused by a pilot error, there was no technical fault with the aircraft.

These statements were widely criticized in the media and by experts, since they were made at a time when it was impossible to know so quickly what happened without being able to properly assess the situation or know the facts.

However, according to an investigative report by the Turkish daily Sabah in February 2012, citing internal correspondence, the flight recorders were never actually handed over to Lufthansa Technik.

The sub-lease contract between World Focus Airlines and Atlasjet for the operation of the MD-83 was signed on 25 June 2007 for a five-month period, which ended on 25 November 2007, five days prior to the crash.

Investigators also determined that the engines were operating at the time of the collision with terrain, that the landing gear and flaps were deployed properly, that there was no fire, neither pre-crash nor post-crash, and that the crew's alcohol and drug tests returned negative results.

Because the site where the aircraft came to rest did verifiably not correspond with the official flight path – the flight ended up to the northwest of the airport whereas it was approaching it from the south – and the air traffic controller's account that the crew neither requested a deviation nor declared any other inconvenience such as an emergency, it was determined that there was some kind of navigational error by the fault of the crew.

The Turkish Transport minister Binali Yıldırım stated that the crash was a "normal controlled flight into terrain by the fault of the crew."

The court announced its final decision around five years later in January 2015: World Focus Airlines' owner Yavuz Çizmeci was found guilty of negligent homicide for allowing an aircraft unfit to fly and with known maintenance faults to be leased out, and World Focus Airlines' chief executive officer Aydın Kızıltan and technical chief İsmail Taşdelen were found guilty of negligent homicide for the same reason.

[38] World Focus Airlines' maintenance chief Fikri Zafer Dinçer was also sentenced with 5 years and 10 months in prison for negligent homicide.