Turkey Plans To Fly Its Homegrown Stealth Fighter In 2023, But It’s Still Far From Finished

Turkey believes the homegrown TF-X fifth-generation stealth fighter it is building, also known as the National Combat Aircraft (MMU), could make its first flight this year – the country’s centennial. Even if Ankara meets that ambitious deadline, it will still have many years more work ahead of it before it can even hope to rollout a truly fifth-generation aircraft or even a fully functional prototype.

Temel Kotil, CEO of Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), the TF-X’s manufacturer, expressed optimism that the aircraft will make its first flight about two years ahead of schedule.

“We were planning to make the first flight of the National Combat Aircraft in 2025, but my teammates were surprised. We took the flight forward,” he told CNN Turk on Jan. 9.

In December 2022, Turkish media quoted Kotil saying that the TF-X would make its first flight on Oct. 29, 2024, with the first aircraft delivered in 2028 and 24 produced per year after that, with exponential annual increases if necessary.

Having the TF-X prototype fly before the end of 2023 would have significant symbolic value for the Turkish government and defense sector. On Jan. 9, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that the country is “determined to make 2023 a turning point in the defense industry along with other fields.”

Ankara intends to have a number of new domestically-built aircraft make their maiden flights before the year is out. Since it is the single most ambitious project Turkey is undertaking, having the TF-X among them would convey to the public that the project is progressing smoothly.

On the other hand, analysts emphasized that having a flying prototype to showcase to the public does not indicate Turkey is even close to completing a functional fifth-generation fighter.

“The main thing that I would stress is that there is a huge difference between producing a shape that looks like a fifth-generation fighter that will fly as a prototype and actually producing and mass manufacturing a combat aircraft that works as a fifth-generation fighter in combat,” Justin Bronk, the senior research fellow for airpower and technology in the Military Sciences Team at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told me.

Aaron Stein, a Turkey analyst, the chief content officer at Metamorphic Media, and author of The US War against ISIS: How America and its Allies Defeated the Caliphate, is similarly skeptical.

“We really do not know anything, but I would expect what we are seeing in pictures and what will fly in 2023 is a very basic prototype, and what will emerge at the end of the development process will have lots of changes to this design,” he told me.

“The shape of the jet looks like a low-observable platform, although there are some things that I see that will make its RCS (radar cross section) much larger than the F-35 and F-22,” he said.

“Again, this is a prototype, so this all may change,” he added. “The real interesting parts of jets is what we can’t see, so we can’t make any real judgments about the jet because we cannot see what the avionics will look like.”

A video filmed on Nov. 21, 2022, showed the TF-X prototype on its assembly line in Ankara taking shape. Its fuselage and wings were attached and its cockpit canopy installed. However, it still lacked its twin engines and the cockpit did not have any avionics. It has since reportedly been fitted with General Electric F110 engines, the same American engines TAI manufactures under license for Turkey’s fourth-generation F-16s.

“In particular, the sensor, thermal cooling and engine integration requirements are elements that Turkey is likely to struggle to meet without significant external support,” Bronk said.

Ankara will grapple with these elements “despite the significant achievements of the Turkish aerospace industry with mass-produced smaller UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and launched weaponry in recent years,” he added.

“Russia’s long and so far unsuccessful attempts to develop a true fifth generation fighter from the Su-57/PAK FA program over more than a decade are an indicator of how difficult a challenge this is even for well-established fighter manufacturers.”