To make matters worse, when America's secretary of state, Colin Powell, at last let it be known that his government now wanted nothing more than overflight rights, to which the Turkish parliament agreed on March 20th, the government denied the Americans use of Turkish airspace, saying it wanted them to agree to the deployment of thousands of Turkish troops in northern Iraq.

ECONOMIST: Turkey's promises were always too hard to keep

But on March 1st the Turkish parliament refused, by three votes, to approve the troop deployment.

ECONOMIST: Turkey's promises were always too hard to keep

First came the Turkish parliament's refusal in March 2003 to let American troops cross its soil to invade Iraq.

ECONOMIST: Turkey and the Armenians

The diary of Ozden Ornek, a retired naval chief, leaked in late March to Nokta, a Turkish weekly, suggests several factors may have been involved.

ECONOMIST: Turkey and its army

Under a UN special envoy, Alexander Downer, the Greek-Cypriot president (Demetris Christofias) and his Turkish-Cypriot counterpart (Dervish Eroglu since March 2010), have held 100 meetings since September 2008.

ECONOMIST: The insoluble Cyprus problem

But the crash of a Turkish Airlines' DC-10 10 minutes after take-off from Paris in March 1974 put the cargo door problems in a whole new light.

BBC: Dreamliner trouble: A brief history of airliner problems

In March 2012, a helicopter crashed near the Afghan capital, Kabul, killing 12 Turkish soldiers on board and four Afghan civilians on the ground, officials said.

NPR: 5 US Troops Die In Helicopter Crash In Afghanistan

And on March 26th Turkey's chief of the general staff, Hilmi Ozkok, announced that he wanted Turkish troops to enter northern Iraq only in full co-ordination with the Americans.

ECONOMIST: Turkey's promises were always too hard to keep