A drone from the TV people

Vestel is a name Europeans see on the back of televisions: the Zorlu group’s Manisa factories were Europe’s largest TV producer in 2006. In 2003 the group set up a defence company, Vestel Savunma Sanayi, and its best-known product was the Karayel, a medium-altitude drone that first flew on 30 April 2014. Its party piece was triple-redundant distributed avionics of the kind used in manned aircraft, applied, according to Wikipedia, to an unmanned design for the first time.

Karayel over Yemen

The Karayel offered about 20 hours’ endurance and a ceiling of 6,900 metres, and the armed Karayel-SU carried munitions of up to 30 kg under each wing plus a 50 kg internal bay. The Turkish Armed Forces operated a small number, and Saudi Arabia took six, with talk of 40 more over five years. Several were shot down by Houthi forces over Yemen between 2019 and 2022, with videos of the wreckage published.

Reborn as Lentatek

In Turkey the Karayel was overshadowed by Baykar’s TB2, and the company complained of insufficient support from the defence procurement agency. In 2022 it was renamed Lentatek. Under the new name it leads the Kargı loitering munition project, begun in 2015 and first shown in June 2022, with ASELSAN, TÜBİTAK SAGE and engine maker TEI as partners; Kargı is intended to replace Turkey’s ageing Israeli Harpy drones.