On 05 December, Bloomberg reported that Turkey is in talks with Pakistan to establish an assembly plant for drones, citing several unnamed Turkish officials.
According to Bloomberg, the project would “see Turkey export stealth and long-endurance drones to be put together in Pakistan,” with talks ongoing since October, but have since “advanced significantly.”
The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) at the center of these talks is likely Baykar, which has not only exported small numbers of several unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems – notably the Bayraktar TB2 and Bayraktar Akıncı – to the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), but had also invested in the PAF’s in-house R&D centre, the National Aerospace Science & Technology Park (NASTP).
While the Baykar-NASTP partnership led to the development of the KaGeM V3 miniature air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) or loitering munition, Quwa was told that Baykar has since wrapped up its ties with NASTP and moved to establish Baykar Technologies Pakistan so as to directly engage with Air Headquarters (AHQ) and the wider Pakistani drone and loitering munitions market.
Thus, it appears that discussions to establish a drone assembly plant in Pakistan may be tied to Baykar’s domestic subsidiary. Moreover, these discussions indicate that the PAF – and potentially the Pakistan Army (PA) and/or Pakistan Navy (PN) – may be interested in ordering large numbers of Bayraktar drones, making local assembly feasible.
Though inducted in 2022, the PAF does not operate large numbers of either the Bayraktar Akıncı or the Bayraktar TB2. Instead, the bulk of the PAF’s drone operations are managed through either domestic or Chinese-built solutions. That said, it is rare for the PAF to engage in small-scale orders; it generally inducts new aircraft with the intent to procure them in larger numbers over the long term.
In fact, platforms like the Bayraktar Akıncı essentially require the logistics, ground support, and maintenance overhead of a crewed aircraft. In other words, the overhead of inducting these aircraft is relatively high and would not justify flying fewer than 12 units (in Quwa’s estimation, the PAF currently operates two to four Akıncı drones. Overall, the PAF will likely use the Akıncı as its primary peacetime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform, especially for peacetime operations, thanks to both its significant endurance (of up to 24 hours) and payload capacity (capable of handling a mix of sensors, from optronics to passive electronic warfare arrays to radars).
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