Baykar

Founded in 1986 with the aim of supplying the automotive Industry, Baykar has transformed itself into Turkiye's leading UAV and AI Company. The development and people-focused culture plays a leading role in the success of Baykar's defense technologies, which are included in the inventory of the Turkish Armed Forces and exported abroad. The Baykar R & D Center registered by the Ministry of Industry and Technology, is focused on designing advanced transformative technologies for the aviation arena. The team spirit is result-oriented and highly motivated. It enables the dynamic application of new technologies with the intertwining of R&D and production processes. Baykar is vertically, intellectually, integrated controlling all elements of the design and manufacturing processes, supported by a robust supply chain in order to "rapidly deliver tomorrow's solutions today".

Baykar's capabilities include all life cycle phases of its systems. It has an organizational and technological structure in all stages after the emergence of the system idea, research and product development, production and after-sales activities. Research and Development capabilities include the complete design and development of UAV systems, aerial platforms and ground components with their subsystems. In addition to that, activities are carried out according to the relevant military and civilian standards.

Designed UAV systems are manufactured with their subsystems and components, integrated and offered to service after passing the detailed testing and quality control stages. In production activities, modern machines and equipment are used for high technology production. 3 and 5-axis advanced CNC machines, automatic assembly machines, autoclaves wide enough to produce long parts such as wings, composite furnaces and high precision measuring devices of various sizes are among the important equipment in the production area.

Aluminum, titanium alloy materials, which are used extensively in aviation, can be produced in such a way that they have precise surface and machining tolerance. PCB and avionics production activities are carried out in clean room conditions in accordance with the relevant military and civilian standards. In order to maintain product quality at the military level, production control processes are supported by suitable equipment such as spectrum and network analyzers, signal generators, high resolution microscopes.

In 1984, �zdemir Bayraktar established Baykar Makina in order to contribute to the country's efforts to indigenize the automotive industry. He founded Baykar with a single drilling machine, but went on to innovate a host of manufacturing and design techniques and directed the design of a part processing apparatus for the precision machining industry.

�zdemir Bayraktar, who took a leading role in Baykar's breakthrough in developing national Unmanned Aerial Vehicle technology, took an active and leading role in the implementation of these projects, from the design stage to the prototyping stage, and from the manufacturing stage to investment planning.

The Bayraktar Mini UAV became the first unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Baykar for the Turkish Air Force, and �zdemir Bayraktar led the R&D carried out alongside soldiers in Southeastern Anatolia between 2005 and 2009.

�zdemir Bayraktar provided first-draft drawings for the designs of Baykar's original products, imparting the character of his work to the Bayraktar TB2 and to the Bayraktar Akinci UCAV. He always blended his engineering talent with up-to-date technologies throughout his working life, never losing his determination, belief and enthusiasm for improvement. Over the course of his work in the Southeast, through 2007 and until his death, Baykar R&D facilities acted as his home due to the sense of responsibility he felt for his country, especially around UAV technology. It can be said he barely stayed at his private home throughout that time.

Haluk Bayraktar is the CEO of Baykar, Turkiye�s premiere autonomous technology company. Haluk began his tenure at Baykar in 2004 as an engineering manager when Baykar�s autonomous technology efforts were still nascent. He has since been involved in every aspect of the business: from engineering to project management to logistics support and business development.

He grew employee headcount from under 10 to over 700, converting Baykar from an automotive SME to a world-class leader in developing unmanned aerial technologies. He co-developed all unmanned systems, handling multiplicity of functions in the product development lifecycle from design to build, and organized investment and business development activities. He established digital transformation and supply chain system for Baykar.

Sel�uk Bayraktar is the CTO of Baykar, founding chairman of the T3 Foundation, and chief architect of Turkiye�s first indigenous, operational UAV Systems. As a graduate student at Penn in 2003, and for the first time in world history, he successfully carried out air-ground coordination of UAVs in formation flight alongside terrestrial robot teams. He continued to set record-setting milestones at MIT with his research in the autonomous, aggressive maneuvering of Unmanned Helicopter Systems, publishing his work in leading journals of controls engineering.

He returned to Turkiye in 2007 and has since been serving as the CTO of Baykar, which developed the first national UAVs to serve the Turkish Security Forces in excess of hundreds of thousands of hours. He has advanced his applied research in the fields of avionics system architecture, flight control, navigation algorithm development, system kinematics and dynamics, electronic hardware and embedded software development. Throughout his work, he has emphasized the indigenization of unmanned technology and underlined its importance as a national priority.

The Turkish defense industry, which increased its export performance in recent years and aims to be among the top 10 in the world within five years, in January 2022 signed the first export contract for the state-of-the-art unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) Bayraktar Akinci, one of the company's newest products. Istanbul Defense and Aerospace Cluster Association (SAHA) Chairperson of the Board and drone magnate Baykar General Manager Haluk Bayraktar, evaluating the performance of the sector in 2021 told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Turkiye is yielding positive outcomes of its vision of nationalizing defense and aviation products step by step.

Bayraktar emphasized that thanks to the steps and efforts taken toward developing domestic unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and UCAVs, both met the needs of the country as well as the technology being exported to the world. He stated that export contracts were signed with 16 countries for Bayraktar TB2 UCAVs, which completed 420,000 flight hours.

"We have also completed the first export contract of Bayraktar Akinci UCAV. Within the scope of the contract, we will deliver Bayraktar Akinci UCAVs and ground systems in 2023. Baykar, which carries out all its projects with its own resources from the research and development (R&D) stage, generates more than 85% of its revenues from exports," he announced.