Thirteen minutes over Ankara

On 21 February 2024 a grey, angular jet lifted off from the Mürted airfield north of Ankara, climbed to 8,000 feet, reached 230 knots and landed again 13 minutes later. It was not much of a flight by fighter standards. But the aircraft was the Kaan, Turkey’s own fifth-generation stealth fighter, and the company that built it had started life assembling other people’s aeroplanes. In July 2025 Indonesia signed agreements for 48 of them, before the type had even entered Turkish service.

An F-16 factory with a Turkish flag

The roots go back to 28 June 1973, when the Turkish state founded Türk Uçak Sanayii, TUSAŞ, to cut its dependence on foreign arms. The real start came when Turkey chose the F-16. On 15 May 1984 a joint venture called TAI was set up near Ankara, with Lockheed Martin’s Turkish arm eventually holding 42 per cent and General Electric 7 per cent, to build the fighter, integrate its systems and flight-test it. TAI turned out 232 F-16s for the Turkish Air Force, then 46 for Egypt between 1993 and 1995, the first sale of a foreign-built F-16 to a third country. When the last Peace Onyx IV jet left in December 2012, it was the 308th F-16 TAI had delivered.

Buying out the Americans

In January 2005 the Turkish side bought out the American shareholders, and on 28 April 2005 TUSAŞ and TAI merged into a single, wholly Turkish company. It kept busy as a subcontractor, making fuselage panels for the Airbus A320 family, parts for the A400M, A350 winglets and centre fuselages for the F-35, and licence-building CN-235 transports, SF.260 trainers and Cougar helicopters. In 2008 it signed up to turn the Italian A129 Mangusta into the T129 ATAK attack helicopter, gaining full rights to sell it abroad.

The drone that replaced the American drones

There is a neat irony in the drones. In 1993 Turkey was one of the first export buyers of the American General Atomics Gnat, the ancestor of the Predator, and its air force eventually flew 22 of them. They were replaced by TAI’s own Anka, which first flew on 30 December 2010. By August 2018 an Anka-S had carried out what Turkey called its first satellite-controlled airstrike, and the twin-engine Aksungur followed in 2019. More than a hundred Ankas have been built, and Tunisia, Pakistan and others have signed up.

Fighters, trainers and a stealth wingman

The 2010s were a rush of firsts. The Hürkuş turboprop trainer, named after the aviation pioneer Vecihi Hürkuş, flew in August 2013. The T625 Gökbey utility helicopter flew in 2018. In 2023 the supersonic Hürjet trainer and the jet-powered, flying-wing Anka-3 both made maiden flights, and in July 2024 a Hürjet flew to Madrid to compete for Spain’s F-5 replacement, which led to a deal signed that December. Not everything worked: the TRJ regional airliner project was cancelled, and in 2024 the company was found to have passed titanium with falsified paperwork into Boeing and Airbus supply chains, though tests later showed the metal was the correct grade.

Gunfire at the gate

On the afternoon of 23 October 2024, at a shift change, two PKK militants arrived at the Kahramankazan headquarters by taxi, set off an explosive and forced their way in with assault rifles. Five people were killed, among them an engineer, a technician, a security guard and the taxi driver, and 22 were wounded before both attackers died. The company carried on. In 2025 its defence revenue rose 16 per cent to 3.65 billion dollars, ranking it 48th in the world, and it now employs some 17,000 people, about 7,000 of them engineers.

Fabrikalar

• Kahramankazan headquarters · Kahramankazan, Ankara — Main campus; target of the October 2024 attack, with about 7,500 workers on site at the time
• Akıncı (Mürted) air base facility · north of Ankara — Aircraft assembly, flight test and delivery; Kaan’s first flight
• Space Systems Integration and Test Center (USET) · Kahramankazan, Ankara — Satellite assembly and test, including Göktürk-1

İnsanlar

• Temel Kotil · general manager until June 2024 — Led TAI through the first flights of Hürjet, Anka-3 and Kaan
• Mehmet Demiroğlu · general manager since June 2024 — Mechanical engineer; previously ran the helicopter division and worked at TEI
• Ömer Cihad Vardan · chairman of the board since June 2024
• Ercan Çelik · chief test pilot, Hürjet — Flew the Hürjet maiden flight on 25 April 2023
• Vecihi Hürkuş · aviation pioneer — Turkish fighter pilot and engineer after whom the Hürkuş and Hürjet are named

Rekorlar ve ilkler

• First third-country sale of a foreign-built F-16: 46 TAI-built jets for Egypt, 1993–1995
• Kaan, first flight 21 February 2024: Turkey’s first fifth-generation fighter to fly
• Hürjet, first flight 25 April 2023: Turkey’s first jet trainer and light fighter
• Anka-S carried out what Turkey described as its first satellite-controlled airstrike, August 2018