The Turkish Undersecretariat for the Defense Industry (SSM) has plans to develop Turkey’s capability to produce its own helicopters.Accordingly, the Turna helicopter, general purpose helicopter and fire fighting helicopter projects will be merged to produce helicopters needed by the Land Forces Command, the Gendarmerie General Command, the General Directorate of Security and the General Directorate of Forestry. The SSM has identified that these three projects are dependent on external resources and have decided to develop another project to merge them and to submit this new project to the Defense Industry Implementation Committee (SSİK), to be chaired by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Approval of this project is seen as very likely. Under this project, 86 general purpose helicopters would be produced for the Land Forces Command, the Gendarmerie General Command and the General Directorate of Security. In the final stage of the project, Turkey plans to develop an unmanned helicopter.
Night Sun project suspended
If the project prepared by the SSM gets a go-ahead from the SSİK, consisting of government and military officials, the project for procurement from external sources of 32 helicopters equipped with an illumination system called “Night Sun” for the Gendarmerie General Command and the General Directorate of Security will be canceled since the Turna project, currently being developed by the SSM, has similar specifications. Italian company Agusta, French-German joint venture Eurocopter and Indian company HAL are currently competing for the contract in the tender for procurement of 32 Night Sun helicopters.
First stage: 86 helicopters
Under the project developed by the SSM, 32 helicopters for the Gendarmerie General Command and the General Directorate of Security, 34 helicopters for the Land Forces Command and 20 general purpose helicopters, which will be used for firefighting by the General Directorate of Forestry, will be produced in the first stage.
The General Directorate of Security has six helicopters at four locations in the Gölbaşı district of Ankara, İstanbul’s Atatürk International Airport, Adana’s Şakirpaşa Airport and Diyarbakır’s Ünal Erkan Heliport, and in 2006, it acquired 10 small helicopters for patrol and surveillance purposes. In 2006, it also decided to procure six new helicopters for crime prevention purposes and obtained estimates from various corporations. The Gendarmerie General Command, too, had plans for procuring 26 helicopters and was holding talks to this end.
The General Directorate of Forestry currently has 10 fire fighting helicopters equipped with outdated technology, and in summertime when forest fires are prolific, it has to hire helicopters from Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. The General Directorate of Forestry states that it needs 20 more helicopters for its fire fighting department, but due to budgetary constraints, this cannot be done. Following the merger of the helicopter procurement projects for four public institutions, the SSM will launch a new project for developing an unmanned helicopter. It is reported that the SSM is biased toward giving a chance to domestic corporations in this project and has had talks with Turkish companies Kale Baydar and Vestel, which are currently conducting R&D. The SSM is also planning to produce the automatic pilot systems for these helicopters, considered the most important component of the project. The preparations for manufacturing 886 such helicopters are expected to be completed by 2008.
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