Baykar

Baykar is a privately held Turkish defence manufacturer based in Istanbul, founded in 1984 by Özdemir Bayraktar as a small machine-parts workshop and reoriented toward unmanned aviation in the early 2000s by his sons. Selçuk Bayraktar, an MIT-trained engineer, leads technology and serves as chief technology officer; his older brother Haluk Bayraktar is chief executive. The family connection extends beyond the firm: Selçuk married Sümeyye Erdoğan, daughter of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in 2016, a fact frequently noted in Turkish and foreign coverage of the company.

The product line centres on the Bayraktar family of combat-capable unmanned aircraft. The medium-altitude long-endurance Bayraktar TB2, introduced operationally in 2014, carries laser-guided MAM-L and MAM-C munitions and is the platform that built Baykar’s reputation. The larger Bayraktar Akıncı, a twin-turboprop high-altitude long-endurance design, entered service with the Turkish Air Force in 2021 and carries a heavier and more varied payload, including stand-off cruise missiles. The Bayraktar Kızılelma is the firm’s first jet-powered combat UAV, intended for contested airspace and for operation from Türkiye’s amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu. The TB3 is a folding-wing carrier-capable variant of the TB family designed for the same ship. The Kemankeş is a small turbojet cruise missile launched from these platforms.

Baykar’s export footprint is unusually broad for a non-Western drone maker. The TB2 has been sold to or operated by Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Poland, Qatar, Morocco, Libya’s Government of National Accord, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Albania, Kuwait, Romania and others — Baykar reports contracts in more than thirty countries. Combat use in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, where Azerbaijani TB2s destroyed Armenian armour and air-defence batteries, drove the export surge; Ukrainian TB2s featured prominently in the opening months of Russia’s 2022 invasion, with the song “Bayraktar” becoming a wartime meme. Poland in 2021 became the first NATO and first EU member state to buy the type. Akıncı has been exported to Pakistan, Azerbaijan and several Gulf states.

The company says it employs around 8,000 people and built a new manufacturing campus near Istanbul to support a scaled-up production rhythm. Selçuk Bayraktar has stated that Baykar is the largest exporter in Türkiye’s defence sector by revenue, with the bulk of sales going abroad. In 2024 Baykar acquired the Italian aerospace firm Piaggio Aerospace, its first major foreign industrial purchase, signalling a move into manned aviation and engine work. A new plant in Ukraine, agreed during the war, is intended to localise some assembly there.

Controversy attaches mainly to where the platforms are used. Canada in 2020 suspended export of Wescam EO/IR sensors after evidence that components were being fitted to TB2s used in Nagorno-Karabakh, prompting Baykar to accelerate development of indigenous Aselsan-built optics. Human-rights groups have documented TB2 strikes in Ethiopia’s Tigray war and in Libya that killed civilians. The company’s proximity to the Erdoğan family draws routine political commentary in Türkiye and abroad.

Baykar’s distinctive position is having turned an affordable, exportable, combat-proven armed UAV into a foreign-policy instrument as much as a product line — and then moving up-market into jet platforms and carrier operations while most rivals were still catching up to the TB2.