Deployment

Baykar, a privately held Turkish family firm founded in the 1980s by Ozdemir Bayraktar and led today by chief technology officer Selcuk Bayraktar, who developed the platform, and chief executive Haluk Bayraktar, makes the Bayraktar TB2, the most combat-proven armed drone in the world. The TB2 is a medium-altitude armed uncrewed aircraft with more than twenty hours of endurance, a 150-kilogram payload, and Roketsan laser-guided munitions, flown with triple-redundant flight control that handles autonomous taxi, takeoff, cruise, and landing. More than 800 have been built, accumulating roughly a million flight hours by December 2024, and they have seen combat in Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, and Ethiopia, the deepest verified combat record of any armed drone and the platform's distinguishing registry fact. The company also builds the larger twin-engine Akinci, with 110 delivered by January 2026, and the jet-powered Kizilelma, which has five prototypes and two serial aircraft with a first Turkish Armed Forces delivery expected in the first quarter of 2026, and it reported a 2.2-billion-dollar export record in 2025. Honestly characterized, the TB2 is remotely piloted with autonomous flight functions but a human in the loop for targeting and weapons release, not a fully autonomous AI strike drone, while Kizilelma is being developed toward higher autonomy but remains pre-fielding. The registry records the TB2 and Akinci at production maturity and Kizilelma as an early, pre-fielding sibling, and notes that the export-country count has a thirty-four-versus-twenty-eight discrepancy across sources, that the 250-per-year production figure is an unaudited capacity claim, and that the 2.2-billion-dollar export figure is company and Turkish-media sourced.

Bayraktar TB2 by Baykar · Catalog entry · 1 source · not yet field-verified