Kizilelma, the drone that can shoot down a jet

The industry of Turkish defense continues its rise and tests the new Kizilelma drone (the mela Rossa, ed.), unique in the world capable of shooting down a war jet. Once again, the bar for the war potential of unmanned aircraft is raised Baykar, company whose chief engineer is Selcuk Bayraktar, genus of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but above all brilliant designer and ‘father’ of the Tb2 drone which now flies in 36 countries.

In the test that took place in the skies of the Black Sea Kizilelma successfully shot down a target jet flying at high speed, with missiles supplied to the aircraft. Let i missiles than the latest generation radar they were, like the drone, built in Türkiye. A fleet of five F16s ‘escorted’ the drone in a formation that could soon be repeated by the Turkish army.

Kizilelma then identified the target with the latest generation radar, tracked it and then exploded the rockets that shot it down with the sistema ‘beyond-visual range- (Bvr) basically out of sight. Bvr is a latest generation system that allows you to hit targets in flight between 20 and 40 km away. The action was filmed by another drone designed by Baykar, ‘Akinci’, the same one that located the remains of the helicopter in which Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi lost his life in 2024, normally used for reconnaissance purposes.

Kizilelma’s first time is double good news for Erdogan. On the one hand, the growth of the Defense industry is a result capable of touching the ever-sensitive chords of Turkish nationalism and creating consensus. On the other hand, the images of the war between Iran and Israel and the threat from the latter have pushed the Turkish government to accelerate the improvement of air defense as much as possible. For Turkey, an important step regardless.

Ankara’s army will soon be one of the very few to count on a fleet of unmanned aircraft capable of taking part in aerial combat. Kizilelma is named after a dream that Sultan Fatih had before the capture of Constantinople in 1453, a dream in which the ‘Red Apple’ is considered the metaphor of the long-awaited conquest of the capital of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottomans.

The new drone is equipped with a radar-sensor system combination that makes it capable of identifying wide-range targets, but at the same time being difficult to read by other radars. The radar is the Murad of the Turkish Aselsanthe target detection system is the Turkish Toygun, the Gokdogan rockets they are produced by the Turkish Aselsan, just as the Teber-82 and Tolun high-precision bombs (used to hit ground targets) are produced in Türkiye. A result that drastically reduces Türkiye’s defense dependence on supplies from abroad.

The Baykar company of the gender of Erdogan and brother Haluk sells Tb2 war drones to 36 countries and Akinci reconnaissance drones to 16 countries. Baykar has budgeted 1.8 billion dollars in revenue for both 2023 and 2024 (90% of which is exports) abroad and with Kizilelma is launching a vehicle that could further increase the company’s revenue, make the Turkish army stronger and change the rules of the air force.