Pic of the day: Turkey’s plans to join the stealth fighter club
The stealth arms race is spreading. This image, snapped by a Flight Global reporter, Tolga Ozbek, at this year’s International Defense Industry Fair in Istanbul, Turkey, this week, is apparently one of three proposed stealth fighter designs for the Turkish Air Force. The new jets are being developed under a program called TFX aimed at ...
The stealth arms race is spreading. This image, snapped by a Flight Global reporter, Tolga Ozbek, at this year's International Defense Industry Fair in Istanbul, Turkey, this week, is apparently one of three proposed stealth fighter designs for the Turkish Air Force.
The stealth arms race is spreading. This image, snapped by a Flight Global reporter, Tolga Ozbek, at this year’s International Defense Industry Fair in Istanbul, Turkey, this week, is apparently one of three proposed stealth fighter designs for the Turkish Air Force.
The new jets are being developed under a program called TFX aimed at producing a locally made fighter (with a little help from Swedish jet-maker, Saab) to replace Turkey’s fleet of F-16s. The plan is that they will be operational sometime in the early 2020s and compliment Turkey’s fleet of 116 U.S.-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
If TFX gets past the design phase, Turkey will join the United States, Russia, and China as the sole developers and operators of manned stealth fighter jets. Japan may be Turkey to the Punch with its stealth fighter program called ATD-X. (South Korea is trying to develop its own stealth jet by the 2020s, but that effort has been put on hold.)
But a big question remains for nations developing manned stealth jets: Are they even needed given the advent of stealth drones like the U.S. Navy’s X-47B, France’s nEUROn and Britain’s Taranis that can perform reconnaissance and ground attack missions — and even land on aircraft carrier decks? One can only imagine what unmanned planes under development 10 years from now will be capable of doing.
John Reed is a national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He comes to FP after editing Military.com’s publication Defense Tech and working as the associate editor of DoDBuzz. Between 2007 and 2010, he covered major trends in military aviation and the defense industry around the world for Defense News and Inside the Air Force. Before moving to Washington in August 2007, Reed worked in corporate sales and business development for a Swedish IT firm, The Meltwater Group in Mountain View CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter at the Tracy Press and the Scotts Valley Press-Banner newspapers in California. His first story as a professional reporter involved chasing escaped emus around California’s central valley with Mexican cowboys armed with lassos and local police armed with shotguns. Luckily for the giant birds, the cowboys caught them first and the emus were ok. A New England native, Reed graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a dual degree in international affairs and history.
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