Unmanned Aerial Vehicle The latest drone news
In a tightly-guarded factory in a suburb of Istanbul, workers are attaching parts to the belly of a Bayraktar TB2 drone.
he ash-grey craft, no bigger than a motorboat, sits in the middle of a gigantic space filled with hundreds of bustling engineers.
Wings have been stacked side-by-side around the room, prepared to be attached to the weapon that has given Ukraine some of its most decisive victories against the Russian army.
Security is tight. Employees must hand in their phones at the door under rules designed to prevent espionage, while news photographers are only allowed to shoot the TB2 from an approved angle.
Overseeing it all is Selcuk Bayraktar, the 42-year-old son-in-law of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has turned Baykar Technology into a global phenomenon in less than a decade. A talented engineering student, Mr Bayraktar completed a masters degrees in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT.
In 2007, he became chief technology officer for Baykar, a company founded by his father several decades earlier.
With a 39ft wingspan, the Bayraktar TB2 drone can carry four laser-guided bombs and has been credited with stalling Russia’s advance on Kyiv, demolishing tanks and armoured vehicles moving towards the capital.
Mr Bayraktar makes no secret of his views on the war.
“I wish we didn’t have any weapons in the world but if someone has 100 times more weapons than you… and they don’t just kill you, they rape you and torture you – you have do to something,” he said, calling the Russian invasion an “illegal occupation”.
Mr Bayraktar’s ambitions were given lift-off by politics. In the early 2010s, President Erdogan was becoming increasingly concerned about Turkey’s reliance on foreign-made weaponry, given that US Congress was blocking the sale of drones to Ankara. By 2014, Baykar Tech’s TB2s drones were carrying out missions for the Turkish military.
The first major test came with Turkey’s cross-border strikes against Kurdish militants in Syria and Iraq. Mr Bayraktar was so involved he “lived in the field” in a Turkish border area, helping out with constant software and hardware upgrades for what he calls a “struggle against terrorism” (human rights groups, though, criticised the strikes for displacing civilians).
In 2015, Turkey’s best-known mechanical engineer married Mr Erdogan’s youngest daughter, Sumeyye, in a lavish ceremony featuring 6,000 guests including the emir of Qatar, the prime minister of Lebanon and other dignitaries.
Making drones, says Mr Bayraktar, is not about profit but “developing hi-tech aviation for Turkey to make our nation independent and strong”, a mission he said he shares with his late father, his CEO brother and mother, who, at 70, still works for the company and even lives on the premises.
Ukraine’s army has received about 50 TB2s since the war started, says Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov, and “several dozen more” were expected in the near future.
When the war is over, Mr Bayraktar plans a joint venture in Ukraine but he was coy about what he has learnt about the Russian military since the invasion. He said Baykar is constantly upgrading its systems, taking into account latest updates from the battlefield.
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
