Turkey Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

@Radonislav Another prime example of how these things work in Turkiye. Some tv anchor has the landing footage of TB3 posted on his twitterpage as a first. They got some strings they can pull that the average joe doesn't have.

As such, don't disregard the insiders with collapsible sticks. All of this is courtesy of a certain PhD on Baudrillard. Talk about simulation and simulacra!

Take-off and landing:

Turkiye's first quantum computer to be operational tomorrow:

This stuff is a waste of time and money. People have been working on Josephson Junctions since like the 1960s.
We are closer to getting economically viable fusion power that this.

It might be the case that Kaan is using an uprated F110-GE-129 that provides (close to) 31000lbf of thrust. Let us call it the F110-GE-131. How?

Eray Gucluer has stated multiple times now that the "F-16 engine" on Kaan provides 30000-31000lbf of thrust. This made me think there is more to the F110-GE-129E's used on the Kaan.

The F110 is an engine that has a lot of room for improvements as has been shown starting from the first iteration the F110-GE-100 providing 28000lbf to a variant that provided 36000lbf already back in 1992.


Regardless of the usefulness of this highly uprated F110, it shows what the F110 is capable of. By using developments from the civilian CFM56 and newer technologies in materials and design GE came up with the F110-GE-129IPE and F110-GE-129EFE/132 with improved life, MTBO and of course, thrust. Changes from the -100 to the -129 are more modest than those from the -129 to the -132 which incorporated an all blisk fan (derived from the F118) and an improved afterburner.

GE introduced a program to extend the service life of the F110 in service all over the world, calling it the SLEP (Service Life Extension Program). The aim of the SLEP is to enhance the durability of the F110 by improving various engine components. These improvements could theoretically be used to increase the thrust of the engine as it uses a more efficient HPC derived from the CFM56-7, better cooling and better materials for turbine blades (using SC alloy) and an improved combustor. One of the nations that makes use of the SLEP is Turkiye.

While the SLEP itself is quite extensive, it doesn't feature the all blisk fan, nor the changed design of the afterburner from V-ring to the F/H radial augmentor used on the F110-GE-132, as it trades thrust for extended life and cost saving.

Is it possible the F110-GE-129E's used on the Kaan are build from the beginning with SLEP enhancements which could be used for an uprated thrust figure instead of extended durability (4300TAC vs 6000TAC MTBO)? In my opinion yes. The advantages are many: No use of a new variant like the F110-GE-132 which isn't qualified for dual-engine use thereby saving time and cost. Secondly, using an engine that the Turkish Airforce has decades of operating and maintenance experience in.

The SLEP upgrade might not be as extensive as that of the F110-GE-132, but is a convenient middle road for the F110-GE-129 to provide that extra punch without compromising safety and durability. As the SLEP extends MTBO to 6000 TAC compared to the original 4300 TAC of the F110-GE-129, an uprated F110-GE-129 with SLEP enhancements should have a similar MTBO of 4300TAC at a thrust of ~31000lb, the F110-GE-131.

Would GE be open to such an uprated interim variant just for the Kaan? I don't see why not. Earlier in the development of Kaan, GE apparently offered to build an F110-GE-135 with as the name suggests it, 35000lbf of thrust. As is obvious, that offer was not taken.

sequ said:

- Baykar singed a contract with Croatia for 6 TB2, worth $91 million.

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And it comes with Aselflir-500.

Hürjet P2 got a very nice paintjob:


An absolute beauty it is!

Repkon singed a deal with Pakistan for a 155mm artillery production line with a capacity of 120000 per year:

sheogorath said:

Are there any availble resources where one can read about the history of aircraft and aircraft components manufacturing and development in Turkey?.

I was aware Turkey made parts for the F-16 and the F-4, as far as I am aware, but I'm curious in how they seem to be overtaking India in many projects despite the fact that the latter seemed to have been going at it longer and with more help.

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Turkey was also making parts for the F-35, iirc.

India joined the UAV race quite late, even later than Pakistan.

They don't put proper effort in innovating, in general. They'll build foreign equipment under license but never innovate or invent much on their own. Take the Su-30MKI, for example; it's built in India since mid-1990's. That's enough time to learn and build a derivative, and improve on it domestically, like China did with the J-15, J-16, etc. But no. Nothing. This is the general story of India across all sectors, including their so called IT/CS sector where they'll pump out millions of professionals but never an Indian brand.

sequ said:

At another TV channel, he said that Kaan is to fire missiles with a range of 200-220km at the firing tests to be held in the first half of 2025. He didn't specify whether it would be air-to-air or air-to-ground missiles though.

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IHA-230?

_killuminati_ said:

Turkey was also making parts for the F-35, iirc.

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here are old official charts from back when Turkey was still a part of the program:



I also recommend you to read this about TAI's participation(they mainly supplied the central fuselage):






EDIT: So, this was not at all as insignificant as the Americans kept telling people about it during the whole S-400 dilemma. Tom Burbage, the former executive vice president of Lockheed Martin's F-35 program tells us in the podcast below that the decision to kick Turkey out was always political, not technical and that the program suffered quite a bit for it:

There's a lot of things that we did, but the industry had to step up and make investments. The nations had to step up and make investments. I think we opened five world-class, new factories in the same year, one in Norway, one in Denmark, one in Turkey. They were just being built to support the F-35.

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Well that cost is carried through to the ultimate buyer, so all those things had to be analyzed and stopped wherever they could to get some efficient processes in place. In general, and I'll tell you another good example, one of the best suppliers on the program was Turkey. When Turkey was moved out of the program for political reasons, we lost a really important part of that base because they were the second source on the center fuselage, which has as many man-hours in it as a full F16. It was a big piece of structure and they were doing exceptionally good work.

I spent quite a bit of time with the Turkish industry guys over there and it's an amazing... They have tax benefits, they have cost benefits. Our problem was to not give them so much work because they could earn it if it was just based on earning, but we had to have some to share with others. The industrial guarantee with all the partner countries was it would be direct work on the program. It would not be hams from farms and stuff like that, which have tended to be the offset type stuff. It had to be direct work F35.

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There's still some stuff in the podcast about Turkey that I left out here so go ahead and listen to it if you're still interested. It's also really informative regarding what was going on at the JPO during different phases of the program.