Selçuk Bayraktar, Baykar’s chief technology officer, first spoke publicly about a shipborne version of the company’s drones in October 2020, and computer images followed in July 2021. The first prototype was shown in March 2023, made its first engine runs and taxi tests that October, and flew for the first time on 27 October 2023. In early tests the undercarriage stayed down; the first flight with the gear retracted came in November 2023. On 20 December 2023, according to Baykar figures reported by Naval News, a TB3 stayed aloft for 32 hours and covered about 5,700 km.

Before risking the ship, Baykar built a land-based ramp replicating the bow of TCG Anadolu and made the first ski-jump take-off from it on 1 June 2024. Later that month a TB3 reached 36,310 ft. By the time of the first deck landing in November 2024, the prototypes had flown more than 700 hours. The design priorities show in the airframe: a long, high aspect-ratio wing for endurance, folding outer panels for hangar stowage, a stronger undercarriage for deck landings and automatic take-off and landing so that the aircraft does not depend on a pilot’s judgement in the last seconds of an approach to a moving deck.

The TB3 has spent much of its early life proving it can work alongside other forces. In February 2026, during NATO’s Steadfast Dart 2026 exercise in the Baltic near Kiel, TB3s operated from TCG Anadolu in temperatures of around −5°C, heavy snow and strong winds. Baykar said the drone flew when weather had grounded other aircraft, and Turkish reporting described an eight-hour joint sortie with German Air Force Eurofighters. Baykar’s release also referred to recent live firings in which surface targets were hit with MAM-L munitions, without saying they took place during the exercise.

In September 2026, in Turkey’s Seawolf exercise in the Eastern Mediterranean, a TB3 launched from Anadolu dropped two sonobuoys from a Baykar pod and shared underwater data with a crewed maritime patrol aircraft. That points to a role well beyond strike: the anti-submarine and maritime surveillance work that small navies struggle to cover with crewed aircraft. These are exercise results reported by the manufacturer and Turkish media; they say what the system has been shown to do, not how it would fare against a capable opponent.

Baykar offers the TB3 in land and naval versions. In Turkey the first acceptance was by the Land Forces Command, announced on 4 September 2025, alongside the naval aircraft flying from TCG Anadolu. In February 2025 Indonesia signed for 60 TB3s and nine Akıncıs with a plan for a joint venture in Indonesia to manufacture, assemble and maintain drones. In Italy, Leonardo and Baykar formed LBA Systems, which in July 2026 said it had reached full operational readiness; its Astore Levante combines the TB3 airframe with Leonardo systems and is intended for short-runway carriers, with first deliveries to an Italian end-user planned for 2026.

Neither Baykar nor the Turkish Navy has published flight-hour costs for the TB3. What can be said is structural. A single diesel engine of 170 hp burns a small fraction of the fuel of any crewed jet, there is no ejection seat or life-support system to maintain, and the ship needs no catapult or arresting gear. The main running costs are likely to be people (pilots, payload operators and maintainers in shifts for long sorties), satellite bandwidth and sensor upkeep. For a navy that could not obtain the F-35B, the attraction is a way to put persistent eyes in the air from Anadolu at a cost per hour that is far below that of jets, accepting far lower speed and payload.