As Turkey’s elite flying squad drew the crescent and star of the national flag across Ankara’s sky, Turks on the ground raced for a picture with Selcuk Bayraktar — the man they call a hero for turning the Middle Eastern country into a key global supplier of deadly combat drones.
Bayraktar is also the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and there, on the tarmac of a military base, his company Baykar displayed its new generation of unmanned combat aircraft. They will fly faster and farther, while carrying more weapons than its existing models.
The new generation of drones reflect the growing ambitions of a company that has grown increasingly powerful overseas after Ukraine used its TB2 drones to fight Russian forces with substantial effect.