Excluded from the F35 program, Turkey reorganizes its aeronautical ambitions without the West

While the American Department of Defense had just officially notify Ankara of its definitive exclusion from the F35 program in case of the acquisition of S400 systems from Russia, Selcuk Bayraktar, the CTO of the Bayraktar company, well known for its TB2 drones which played a decisive role in the Turkish engagements in Syria and Libya, as well as in the forces of Azeri forces during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict of 2020. The latter detailed the roadmap that the Turkish authorities were preparing to follow in the field of military aeronautics. And the least that can be said is that the country does not lack ambitions, with the ultimate objective of achieving, by the end of the decade, complete strategic autonomy in this area.

Therefore, Bayraktar is currently developing a "hunting" combat drone, which we can imagine comparable to the British Lanca or the American Valkyrie, with the objective of making it fly by 2023. At the same time, the company TUSAŞ is developing the HÜRJET training and attack aircraft program, which recently passed the basic design stage. Finally, the entire Aeronautical Defense industry of the country remains mobilized for the T-FX program, which with the definitive withdrawal of the F35 program, appears even more critical for Ankara, with the objective of fly the aircraft equipped with nationally-made turbojets by 2029. The fact remains that all these programs are visibly hampered by a de facto embargo implemented in the West on this critical technology, and more particularly on engines.

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