Over the flat plains of Çorlu in north-western Turkey this spring, a jet trainer and a tailless black drone flew in tight formation. Nothing unusual in that — except that no one was flying the drone. The pilot doing the commanding sat in the other aircraft entirely, telling the uncrewed machine where to go with a few inputs while it taxied, took off, and slotted into formation on its own.

On 22 June 2026, Italy's Leonardo and Turkey's Baykar revealed what they had pulled off: the first live flight trials of a programme called K-SWARM, in which a crewed Leonardo M-346 jet took direct control of Baykar's KIZILELMA unmanned fighter in the air. It is one of the clearest demonstrations yet of the "loyal wingman" idea that every major air force is now chasing.

And it is a striking pairing — a European trainer manufacturer and a Turkish drone champion, together building the command link for tomorrow's robot combat jets.

A trainer that became a flying command post

The star of the show was not really the drone — it was the relationship between the two aircraft. A Leonardo-owned M-346 in its Fighter Attack configuration acted as the command platform, while an Italian Air Force T-346A flew chase to monitor the mission and gather data.

After the KIZILELMA got airborne on its own, the M-346 assumed full control and began issuing orders. The drone executed position changes, separations and rejoins, responding to the pilot's commands through a dedicated crewed-uncrewed computing system. Baykar's "smart fleet autonomy" algorithms handled the flying; the human handled the decisions.

Why the cybersecurity matters as much as the flying

Handing a pilot control of a separate, weapon-capable aircraft only works if the data link between them cannot be jammed, spoofed or hijacked. That is why a big part of this trial was not aerodynamics at all, but the radio between the two machines.

The companies were careful to call this a first phase. The harder problems — larger formations, multiple drones under one pilot, and eventually genuine swarm tactics — are still ahead. But moving from simulation to real aircraft flying real formations is the milestone that separates a slide deck from a weapons programme.

A new club, and Europe wants in

The United States is pouring money into its Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme; Australia has its Ghost Bat; Turkey already flies the KIZILELMA solo. What K-SWARM does is fuse a proven European training jet — flown by air forces across the continent — with a combat drone that has already taken off and landed by itself dozens of times.

For Leonardo, it repositions the humble M-346 from a machine that teaches young pilots to fly into a node that could one day lead a pack of robots into battle. For Baykar, it is another step in turning the KIZILELMA from a national showpiece into an exportable system with a NATO pedigree. The age of the loyal wingman is no longer a concept video. It is flying.

Sources: Leonardo; Baykar; Defense News; The War Zone; Aerotime.