As it happens, we flew through Istanbul (our stopover en route to a wedding in Rawalpindi and Karachi) on July 15th. Our flight (out of ATL) was scheduled for about 9pm, or about 6 hours after we learned about the start of the failed putsch. There was a line of people at the Turkish Airlines check-in counter in Hartsfield clamoring to get their tickets refunded. They were refusing, insisting the flight would take off as scheduled. Regardless, many of them must've either gotten refunds or been scared into losing their money. The plane (which indeed took off more-or-less on time) was practically empty.
While it was certainly disconcerting to learn after we hit the ground that the FAA banned future flights to/from IST during our flight, we didn't have big problems. Our flight to Pindi was delayed by about 6.5 hours. Not ideal, especially when traveling with a 2 year-old, but manageable. It would have been better had they simply updated things more frequently. At one point, they were saying our flight was to take off at a certain time after that time had passed, and without having ever been assigned a gate.
The scene at Ataturk airport wasn't much different than usual, except for two things. There were more people in the terminal with no obvious place to go than usual, and by the end of the night one had the sense that stores/restaurants were starting to run out of a few things. But that was it.
What's really amazing to me is that FaceTime may well have single-handedly foiled the coup. One can only wonder if, had Erdogan not been able to appear on CNN Turk over his iPhone and call Turkey's citizens to resist the wannabe general-kings, would it have worked?
I follow Turkey relatively closely, because my sister-in-law is a graduate student there and we just love visiting the country. Most of the Turks I count as friends support the HDP, not Erdogan's AKP. Still, I hope Erdogan's purges are successful in removing the threat of martial takeover from Turkey again, as this episode must've cost them dearly economically in addition to the human tragedy. Obviously he's going way to far, as thin-skinned people who smell the potential for more power often do. Academics can't leave the country right now, which is absurd. There are also the attacks on the press, that no decent person can condone. Don't get me wrong, Erdogan is still more of a small-d democrat than a certain Putin-loving white supremacist candidate contesting our election. But I hope he realizes that the same social forces that saved his government from the generals can and should come back to end it if he doesn't calm the eff down a little bit.