The American F-35 has new competition from a jet made in Turkey

Turkey’s domestically produced fifth-generation fighter jet undertook its first maiden test flight on February 21st in what was a big step forward for the country’s plans to deploy its own internally produced airframes. 

In 2019, Turkey was kicked out of the F-35 program after Ankara chose to buy S-400 air defense systems from Russia according to Business Insider, which was a decision that led to its own fighter program. 

The Turkish fighter jet is known as KAAN and was developed by Turkish Aerospace Industries with assistance from BAE Systems in a deal that was signed in 2017 worth $125 million dollars according to Reuters. 

“With KAAN, our country will not only have a fifth generation fighter jet but also technologies that few countries in the world have," Haluk Gorgun, head of Turkey's Defence Industries Directorate explained on Twitter. 

The KAAN fighter jet is powered by two General Electric F-110 engines, which are also found in the American F-16. However, Turkey plans to eventually make its own domestically produced engines for the fighter jet.  

Turkish Aerospace Industries CEO Temel Kotil posted on Twitter that the KAAN’s first flight lasted thirteen minutes, clocked at a speed of 230 knots, and reached an altitude of 8,000 feet or roughly 12,740 kilometers, Defense News reported. 

The KAAN has a wingspan of forty-six feet or fourteen meters and a length of sixty-nine feet or twenty-one meters. The new Turkish fighter jet is also expected to have many of the characteristics of a fifth-generation airframe.

Defense News reported that “low observability, internal weapons bays, sensor fusion, advanced data links, and communications systems” will all be a part of the KAAN. The fighter jet is also expected to be in service until 2070. 

“The project places Turkey in a small group of powers working on fifth-generation aircraft,” Bloomberg News noted. However, Turkey’s new fighter jet isn’t expected to be in operational service for several years.

On February 21st, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posted on Twitter that his country had passed a "very critical stage on the way to producing its own fifth-generation warplane” according to a translation from Business Insider.