Kizilelma

The drone that shot down another aircraft beyond visual range — Baykar's Kizilelma ("Red Apple") is a jet-powered, stealth-shaped combat drone marketed as an unmanned fighter: AESA radar in the nose, air-to-air missiles under the wings, carrier operations in the design brief. In November 2025 it tracked a jet target drone with its own radar and killed it with an indigenous BVR missile — a claimed world first for an uncrewed aircraft. It entered serial production before any American Collaborative Combat Aircraft, sold to Indonesia in May 2026, and still flies on Ukrainian engines.

Overview

The Bayraktar Kizilelma is the sharp end of Baykar's climb up the airpower value chain — from the propeller-driven Bayraktar TB2 that defined the drone decade, through the heavy Akinci, to a jet-powered, low-observable-shaped UCAV built to fight in the air, not just strike the ground. Developed under the MIUS program and self-funded by Baykar (a planned ~$1 billion), the Kizilelma-A is an 8.5-tonne, Mach 0.9-class aircraft with a ~930 km combat radius (manufacturer figures), Aselsan's MURAD AESA radar, KARAT IRST, two internal and six external weapons stations, and autonomous taxi, takeoff and landing. Its test record is a run of claimed firsts: live precision-strike shots (October 2025), a simulated electronic "kill" of an F-16 (November 2025), the first beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile kill by a UCAV — a Gökdoğan shot off Sinop on 30 November 2025 with an all-Turkish kill chain — and autonomous two-ship formation flight (December 2025). Serial production began in 2025, the first production aircraft flew in January 2026, and Indonesia signed for 12 (options to 60) in May 2026. It is designed for short-deck operations from TCG Anadolu, though it has never yet touched the ship — and both its engines come from wartime Ukraine.

Development

Baykar sketched MIUS concepts from 2013 and committed publicly in July 2021, signing with Ukraine's Ivchenko-Progress that November for engines — the subsonic AI-25TLT first, the afterburning AI-322F later, per Wikipedia. The first prototype rolled out on 14 November 2022 and made its maiden flight on 14 December 2022 from Baykar's Çorlu test center — barely a year after program launch, per Baykar. Flight test expanded through 2023 (gear retraction, 9.5 km altitude, formation flight with a SoloTürk F-16); in July 2024 the third prototype lit the AI-322F afterburner, per TURDEF, opening the supersonic Kizilelma-B path. The decisive year was 2025: Selçuk Bayraktar announced serial production in August — claiming the first combat aircraft of its class to reach mass production, "before the US and Israel," per Defence Industry Europe; October brought first live weapons drops (Aselsan TOLUN, Roketsan TEBER-82) and the first flight with the MURAD-100A AESA; and on 29–30 November 2025, off Sinop, a Kizilelma tracked a jet-powered target drone with its radar and destroyed it with a TÜBİTAK SAGE Gökdoğan — the claimed world-first UCAV BVR kill, well documented on video though engagement details remain scarce, per Naval News and AeroTime. The first serial unit, S1, flew in January 2026; at SAHA Expo in May 2026 Baykar signed the Indonesia contract (12 aircraft, deliveries from 2028) while conceding Turkish deliveries would come "within this year," per Daily Sabah. In June 2026 a Leonardo M-346 crew took live control of a Kizilelma in the first K-SWARM manned-unmanned teaming trial, per Quwa.

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