Posted on 05/04/2022 4:39:31 AM PDT by FarCenter
ISTANBUL -- A thick dossier of documents passed from one hand to another among officials lined up on a red carpet at the Col. Jesus Villamor Air Base in Manila.
Inside the hangar stood two T129 attack helicopters produced in Turkey.
"They are to be used against enemies of our state -- terrorists trying to destroy our country," Delfin Lorenzana, the defense secretary of the Philippines said at the April 6 handover ceremony.
These are the first helicopters of their kind to be owned by the Philippine Air Force, Lorenzana, the 73-year-old retired Army general added. They were acquired for a price of around $270 million, according to the state-run Philippine News Agency.
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Demir said Turkey's top drone exporter, Baykar Defense, was in "advanced stages of talks" with Pakistan for both its mainstay armed drone TB2, as well as its upgraded version, Akinci, which means "raider" in Turkish.
The TB2, which has destroyed countless Russian supply trucks and missile defense systems in Ukraine, has been sold to 19 countries so far including Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. The newer Akinci has a total payload capacity that is 10 times larger, and it includes munitions, sensors and cameras.
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"There is a new world and it is flat, with fresh engineering tools powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning," he said. "In the past we used to say that if you didn't have a legacy in aerospace, you couldn't develop a plane. Now the whole world can catch up faster," the aeronautical-engineering professor said.
(Excerpt) Read more at asia.nikkei.com ...
I bet drone sales are through the roof following the success of the bayraker drones in Ukraine.
How is the Turkish lira doing now?
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