A stealth aircraft that hangs its bombs under the wings is not really a stealth aircraft. The whole point of a low-observable shape is undone the moment you bolt angular metal to the outside of it. That is why the milestone Baykar announced on 30 July matters more than the word "test" suggests: for the first time, Türkiye's Bayraktar Kizilelma fired weapons from inside its own fuselage.

In back-to-back trials at the Çorlu Flight Training and Test Center in Tekirdağ, the serial-production airframe — tail number S2 — took off, flew to a range, opened its internal bay and released two Turkish-made munitions: a Roketsan TEBER-82 and an Aselsan TOLUN-P. Both, the company says, struck their designated targets.

Why internal carriage is the hard part

The Kizilelma is Türkiye's first unmanned fighter aircraft: jet-powered, tailless-canard in planform, and shaped from the outset for a small radar cross-section. Hanging ordnance on external pylons would betray that shaping to any modern radar. Carrying it internally does not — the weapons ride inside the mould line, where they cost nothing in radar signature, and little in drag or speed.

That is the capability the 30 July firings were meant to prove. An internal bay that can open, release a weapon cleanly into the airflow, and close again is a genuinely difficult engineering problem — one only a handful of nations have solved on a combat aircraft. Doing it on an unmanned platform, with no pilot to manage the sequence, is harder still.

A fast-moving test campaign

The internal-bay release is the latest entry in a rapid integration campaign. The Kizilelma has already fired the Gökdoğan air-to-air missile, the TOLUN and TEBER-82 KGK and LGK-82 munitions, and struck a target with the supersonic JET-230 missile. On 29 November 2025, off Sinop, it destroyed a jet-powered aerial target with a beyond-visual-range Gökdoğan — cued by Aselsan's MURAD AESA radar — which Baykar says made it the first unmanned fighter to score an air-to-air kill of that kind.

Baykar has financed the programme itself, and it does so from a position of strength: the company remained the world's largest exporter of unmanned aircraft in 2025, with a record $2.2 billion in export volume. A stealthy, weapons-carrying jet drone is the natural top of that product line.

What it signals

None of this makes the Kizilelma a finished combat aircraft; a working internal bay is one requirement among many. But it removes a conspicuous asterisk from the design. A drone built to slip through defended airspace can now do so with its weapons hidden where they belong — and that is precisely the point of building it stealthy in the first place.

Sources: Baykar; Türkiye Today; The Aviationist; Defence Turkey.