21MAY

Baykar sells first Kızılelma to Indonesia

3 min read

11:11UTC

Baykar signed its first export contract for the Kızılelma unmanned combat aircraft at SAHA 2026 in Istanbul on Tuesday 5 May. Indonesia takes 12 aircraft from 2028, an option for four further fleets, and a local production line. Saudi Arabia signed a parallel Akinci deal in the same window.

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Key takeaway

Baykar's first Kızılelma export ships with a Jakarta production line attached.

Baykar signed its first export contract for the Kızılelma unmanned combat aircraft at SAHA 2026 in Istanbul on Tuesday 5 May. Indonesia takes 12 aircraft from 2028, with an option for four additional fleets, plus a local production and maintenance centre⁠¹. The platform is an 8.5-tonne MTOW (maximum take-off weight), 1.5-tonne payload, low-observable, carrier-capable design, and it is Baykar's first UCAV (unmanned combat aerial vehicle) distinct from the Bayraktar TB2 reconnaissance lineage that built the company's brand in Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Libya.

Indonesia is the first export buyer for Kızılelma, and the production tie locates Turkish UCAV manufacturing capacity in South-East Asia for the first time, a region absent from prior updates' geographic spread. Saudi Arabia signed a parallel Akinci UCAV deal in the same window, described by Turkish authorities as the country's biggest-ever aviation export. Kızılelma's carrier-capable airframe was designed against the loss of the TB3 niche after the F-35B's reintegration into TCG Anadolu plans; an Indonesian buyer with carrier ambitions is the demand-shape Baykar needed to justify the carrier-capable spec.

The Turkish UCAV business is now exporting across two continents in the same quarter that Helsing closed its $1.2 billion fundraising at an $18 billion valuation, suggesting parallel European and Turkish capacity build-outs of comparable industrial scale. The Indonesia production tie also gives Jakarta a sovereign UCAV capability without depending on Chinese CH-4 or Pterodactyl exports that Beijing has been pitching across South-East Asia since 2018.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Baykar is the Turkish company that makes the Bayraktar TB2, the drone that became famous in Ukraine and Azerbaijan for being cheap, effective, and available to armies that could not afford Western systems. Kızılelma is Baykar's new, more advanced drone. It can take off and land from an aircraft carrier, carries up to 1.5 tonnes of weapons, and is designed to fly deep into defended airspace rather than hovering over lightly defended targets. Indonesia signed a contract in Istanbul on 5 May to buy 12 of them from 2028, with an option for many more and a local production facility. On the same day, Saudi Arabia signed a deal for a different Baykar drone, the Akinci. For Turkey, both deals together represent the biggest aviation export in the country's history.

What could happen next?

Opportunity
A Kızılelma production centre in Indonesia gives ASEAN-aligned buyers a domestic-source option for a carrier-capable UCAV that bypasses both US export controls and Chinese origin concerns.
Risk
Indonesia's history of cancelling non-Western acquisition contracts under US diplomatic pressure (Sukhoi Su-35, 2017-2023) means the 2028 delivery timeline carries political execution risk that is not captured in the signed contract value.

Source Landscape

This story draws on right-leaning sources from Türkiye

Türkiye

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Primary parallel: Brazil's 2013 F-X2 competition, in which Saab's Gripen NG won over Boeing's Super Hornet and Dassault's Rafale, turned partly on the industrial offset and technology-transfer terms Saab offered: Brazil got a production line in São José dos Campos rather than just a supply contract.

Indonesia's Kızılelma deal replicates the structure precisely: an initial aircraft order combined with a local production and maintenance centre, designed to generate sovereign capability rather than dependency on the exporter.

Counter-parallel: South Korea's T-50 Golden Eagle export to Indonesia in 2011, which included a co-production arrangement, faced serial delivery delays and maintenance complications that required South Korean technicians to remain in-country well beyond the original contract period.

Local production arrangements with new entrant manufacturers routinely underestimate the depth of industrial-base support required; the Kızılelma deal's 2028 delivery timeline leaves limited time to establish the production centre before the first aircraft arrive.

Turkey's Akinci deal with Saudi Arabia, described by Turkish authorities as the country's biggest-ever aviation export, and the Kızılelma deal together represent Baykar's transition from a single-product (TB2) company serving conflict-adjacent customers to a multi-product exporter serving Tier 1 defence markets.

Saudi Arabia and Indonesia together represent military aviation budgets exceeding $15 billion annually; Baykar's historic market was Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Libya, none of which exceeded $2 billion in total annual defence spend at peak.

For investors and procurement offices, the Indonesia local-production clause creates a Southeast Asian manufacturing anchor point. Any regional buyer who wants Kızılelma under ASEAN procurement preferences may be able to source from the Indonesian facility rather than directly from Turkey, replicating the Perennial-Munich dynamic on a different continent.

Consensus view: IISS analysts covering Southeast Asian defence markets assess Indonesia's Kızılelma purchase as the first non-Western UCAV acquisition by a major Indo-Pacific archipelago state, filling a capability gap that neither the US (F-35B denial, Reaper export restrictions) nor China (CH-4, Wing Loong credibility concerns after Libya and Ethiopia) had addressed.

The local production and maintenance centre clause is the commercially decisive element: Indonesia is buying sovereignty through the production clause, with the aircraft as the delivery mechanism.

Counter-view: Teuku Faizasyah at the University of Indonesia's international relations faculty argues that Indonesia's defence procurement history shows a pattern of signed deals that do not survive budget revision cycles; the Sukhoi Su-35 contract signed in 2017 was cancelled in 2023 under US CAATSA pressure.

The Kızılelma deal's 2028 delivery timeline faces the same vulnerability: an Indonesian budget revision or a US diplomatic intervention citing CAATSA-adjacent concerns about third-party UCAV technology could stall ratification before the first airframe is built.

Key tension: Whether Turkey's diplomatic positioning as a NATO member reduces the CAATSA-style political risk that has killed other non-Western acquisition deals for Indonesian military clients.

First Reported In

Update #9 · Schmidt's Perennial wins $500M drone deal

Daily Sabah· 21 May 2026

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Different Perspectives

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