Two prototypes of the Turkish unmanned combat aircraft, Bayraktar Kızılelma, have successfully carried out the world’s first fully autonomous close-formation flight by jet-powered drones, Baykar announced on Sunday.
Turkish defense giant Baykar, manufacturer of Kızılelma, is integrating new capabilities into its development process.
The test marked a major milestone in global aviation, as no other country has publicly demonstrated autonomous close-formation flying by unmanned fighter-class aircraft.
The flight was conducted as part of ongoing tests of Kızılelma's smart fleet autonomy capability at the Akıncı Flight Training and Test Center in Çorlu, northwestern Türkiye.
During the test, the third prototype of Bayraktar Kızılelma, PT3, and the fifth prototype, PT5, took off consecutively.
Once airborne, the two unmanned combat aircraft executed synchronized maneuvers and maintained close formation entirely autonomously, without any human intervention. The operation was enabled by smart fleet autonomy algorithms developed by Baykar’s engineering team.
With this achievement, Kızılelma became the first unmanned combat aircraft system in the world to demonstrate autonomous close-formation flight, a task traditionally performed only by manned fighter jets.
This capability enables multiple unmanned platforms, under the command of a leader, to autonomously adjust their relative positions and carry out joint missions.
During the flight test, the Combat Air Patrol (CAP) mission, one of the fundamental elements of modern air combat, was also tested.
Kızılelma prototypes conducted patrol flights along a designated route accompanied by fleet autonomy software. Therefore, the feasibility of conducting air defense missions by a national fleet of unmanned combat aircraft was verified.
Patrol and interception missions carried out by fighter aircraft to protect specific regions may, in the future, be performed autonomously by Kızılelma fleets.
Throughout the test process, the autonomous systems of the unmanned combat aircraft and their cooperative operational procedures were closely monitored.
Developed entirely with Baykar’s own resources, Kızılelma is expected to continue advancing its capability to conduct coordinated operations across multiple platforms, thanks to its smart fleet autonomy infrastructure.
The fighter jet already made history in world aviation during a test conducted on Nov. 29.
In that historic test, conducted off the coast of Sinop in Türkiye's northern province, it achieved a direct hit with the domestically developed Gökdoğan missile while identifying the target aircraft using the Aselsan-developed Murad AESA radar.
This success made the world’s first unmanned combat aircraft destroy a jet-powered aerial target using a beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile (BVRAAM).
Baykar, the largest company in the global unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) export market, has signed export agreements with 37 countries, including 36 for the Bayraktar TB2 and 16 for the Bayraktar Akıncı UAVs.
In a post on the Turkish social media platform NSosyal regarding the test, Baykar Chair and CTO Selçuk Bayraktar said, "World's first!
"Two Unmanned Fighter Aircraft have successfully performed autonomous close-formation flight."
The firm's CEO, Haluk Bayraktar, also marked the development, saying: "Not copying, but inventing; not imitating, but being followed."
