Following the taxi tests in mid-March, the Turkish state-owned aircraft manufacturer Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS or TAI) has now presented its new fifth-generation stealth fighter to the public in front of its headquarters in Ankara. While the aircraft did not leave the ground, it rolled down a hall apron for the assembled crowd at the show.
“This is Kaan, let his sword be sharp,” TAI tweeted about the new name on May 1. Kaan is Turkish for Khan, the equivalent of Great Khan or “King of Kings”. According to TAI CEO Temel Kotil, the first flight of the model could take place before the end of the year.
The development is another important building block in Turkey’s efforts to expand its production of high-quality defense products. This was one of the long-term political goals of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is facing a re-election with his AKP party on May 14, which could prove decisive for the country.
İstikbal, gök vatan, millî muharip uçağımız KAAN! ???????? #İstikbalinYüzyılı pic.twitter.com/EuZEroqByS
– Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (@RTErdogan) May 1, 2023
“Today, we stand before our nation with a new phase of our projects. Little by little, we are realizing the dreams that our nation has had for centuries and that we have been pursuing since the founding of our republic,” Erdogan said at the unveiling ceremony. He tweeted a photo of himself sitting in the cockpit of the new jet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s6oUg9jzpo Replacement for denied F-35
Kaan was originally intended to be an air superiority platform, modeled after the Lockheed F-22 Raptor. It was to be paired with the 100 Lockheed F-35 fifth-generation fighter jets that Ankara wanted to procure and on which Turkey was involved from the outset – for example, the large cockpit display was manufactured in the country. However, this planned fleet mix changed when the USA excluded Turkey from the multinational F-35 development program in 2019, after Ankara insisted on procuring the Russian S-400 air defense system despite repeated warnings from the US. Now the Turkish Air Force (THK) wants to make Kaan the backbone or spearhead of its future fighter jet fleet.
It is certainly worth noting that the twin-engine aircraft was developed and produced almost entirely domestically, with a claimed national share of around 80 percent. The prototypes are powered by two General Electric F110 engines, which were assembled in Turkey under license for the NATO country’s F-16 fleet (243 F-16C/Ds). Last June, the Turkish Defense Procurement Agency issued an invitation to tender for the engines for the production aircraft to “all well-known manufacturers” and encouraged partnerships with the national industry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMzqR-4daOU Several parallel projects by TAI …
The unveiling of the Kaan comes just weeks after TAI also unveiled its new Anka-3 unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV). And in the same week, the company tested two other development projects in their maiden flight: the T929 Atak II combat helicopter (on April 28) and the Hurjet supersonic jet trainer (April 25). Turkey is also in the process of dramatically expanding the capabilities of its naval air force, as less than a month before the unveiling of the Kaan, Ankara commissioned its first semi-aircraft carrier, the TCG Anadolu, on April 10. Originally intended to carry the F-35B short take-off and vertical landing variant, the ship will instead receive an “airwing” of Turkish UCAVs and conventional helicopters.
… and the domestic “family competition”
This squadron will also include a number of devices from TAI’s competitor Baykar Industries, including the Bayraktar TB-2 UCAV, known from Ukraine and Karabakh, as well as the Kizilelma unmanned combat aircraft, which is still under development but has already flown. The latter is in competition for series production with TAI’s aforementioned Anka-3, which is due to fly for the first time in the coming weeks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lri0ydFQeLc It should be noted with regard to the competitive situation that the head of Baykar, Selçuk Bayraktar, is President Erdogan’s son-in-law. He has been described as a kind of “Turkish Elon Musk” and he – a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania – is documented as saying “We have a moral obligation to help Ukraine”. There is even speculation that Bayraktar could one day succeed his father-in-law as head of state. Incidentally, another son-in-law of the president is Berat Albayrak, who serves as finance minister and released funds worth around 100 million euros to Baykar at the beginning of 2020 to advance their drone research. In any case, both models represent what the USAF calls “Collaborative Combat Aircraft” (CCA) – unmanned platforms that are difficult to detect and are intended to complement traditionally piloted combat aircraft.
Election campaign ammunition
The long-term president (and “drone father-in-law”), who has been in poor health recently, then used the approaching elections to make a prophetic appeal on “Labor Day”: “The future is in the sky, because nations that cannot protect their sky can never be sure of tomorrow. We are on the brink of a new era, after the country was previously deprived of industrial power. Today we have airplanes, drones and helicopters starting their engines and making their first flight. We must not leave any work that we have started unfinished.”
