Bayraktar TB2 drones played a pivotal role in confronting the Russian invasion of the steppes of Ukraine, and were used by Azerbaijan against Armenian forces in 2020. In Libya, they helped thwart an attack by a Russian-backed warlord.
These aircraft made their engineer, Selcuk Bayraktar, 42, who trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a popular hero for putting Turkey on the world stage, and perhaps even its next leader, according to a report from the newspaper “Wall Street Journal“.
Bayraktar is often seen wearing a flying jacket. He is married to one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s daughters, and fans gather around him everywhere he goes.
Opinion polls show him as one of the most popular public figures in the country. Now his supporters are promoting him to succeed his father-in-law as president of the country.
Bayraktar said that he has no political ambitions, but he would not rule it out if Erdogan asked him to run in future elections.
“Maybe I will say yes, but it will depend on the circumstances,” he says as he sits on a leather sofa and smokes a cigarette in the pilot training hall at a military base in Izmir on Turkey’s Aegean coast, according to the report.
The debate is now taking place over the issue of who will succeed Erdogan after the president said earlier this month that the country’s local elections at the end of this week would be his last campaign.
The Turkish leader could still change his mind, but close observers of Turkish politics say the race to succeed him has already begun.
Burak Kadircan, a professor of strategy at the US Naval War College and an expert on Turkish politics, said that all signs point towards Bayraktar.
Bayraktar was born in Istanbul to a family of engineers, and his father, Ozdemir Bayraktar, had known Erdogan since they grew up on the Black Sea coast. They stayed in touch when he founded his auto parts company, in the 1990s.
The young Bayraktar spent most of his youth in the family factory, building radio-controlled planes, and those planes became the focal point of his studies in the early 2000s, first in Istanbul, then at the University of Pennsylvania, around the same time that the American “Predator” planes were launched. Manufacture makes a decisive difference on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
From there, he moved toward piloting his own drone prototype at the family factory, at a time when Turkey was working to build an independent domestic arms industry that could weather supply disruptions from Western producers.
Bayraktar’s father saw that his son’s projects could have military value, and helped arrange for him to test them with the Turkish army.
Company executives and engineers credit Bayraktar with helping to oversee the first test flights of the first drone, which they called the “Mini UAV.”
Documentary footage from 2003 showed Bayraktar explaining the importance of unmanned aircraft to a group of military officers. His master’s thesis was entitled “Landing maneuvers for unmanned aerial vehicles.”
In 2014, Bayraktar presented a prototype of a larger drone capable of carrying weapons called TB2.
It may not have been as advanced as its US-made counterparts, but Bayraktar was able to build reliable drones that could overcome air defenses by flying low and slow.
The TB2 is now viewed by many in the industry as the “Kalashnikov of drones” in reference to the iconic Russian rifle that has remained a symbol of infantry personal weapons.
By the time of the Turkish presidential elections last year, Bayraktar aircraft had become an essential part of Erdogan’s brand, highlighted as a symbol of national pride and Turkey’s aspirations for global influence.
The president appeared in one campaign poster wearing a flying jacket similar to the young Bayraktar, and Bayraktar has since echoed some of Erdogan’s nationalist rhetoric.
Bayraktar and his brother Haluk, who became CEO of Baykar after their father’s death in 2021, are among Erdogan’s inner circle of advisors and have assumed more prominent roles in representing the country abroad, according to the newspaper.
The newspaper concludes in its report that none of Erdogan’s sons has a CV of achievements similar to Bayraktar, whose fans see his success as a sign of a better future for the country.
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