ANKA-III: Turkey’s Flying-Wing Stealth Combat Drone, Explained

Image: HÜRJET, ANKA-3 and HÜRKUŞ on display. Photo by UnknownYazar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Turkey’s first generation of armed drones — Bayraktar TB2, the propeller-driven ANKA, the heavier AKSUNGUR — became famous in places like Karabakh and Ukraine. They share one weakness: a propeller-driven airframe, an ordinary wing layout and a relatively slow cruise speed make them easy meat for a modern air-defence radar. The gap between “anti-insurgent UAV that worked in Idlib” and “combat aircraft that can survive a Russian-grade air defence” is exactly what TUSAŞ set out to close with the ANKA-III.

At first sight ANKA-III looks less like a plane than a boomerang. There is no fuselage and no tail — just a single, sweeping flying wing. That shape scatters radar returns instead of reflecting them cleanly back at the emitter; to an enemy radar, ANKA-III is far harder to pick out than a conventional aircraft. A turbofan engine in the centre pushes the airframe to around 860 km/h, roughly Mach 0.7 — three to four times the cruise of a propeller UAV.

The aircraft first lifted off on 28 December 2023. The maiden flight lasted more than an hour, all of it autonomous — take-off, climb, cruise and landing under software, with no joystick pilot. By the twelfth test flight, ANKA-III had already dropped a TÜBİTAK SAGE TEBER-82 laser-guided bomb on a target and scored a direct hit.

At a Glance

To put those numbers in everyday terms: ANKA-III flies three to four times faster than the propeller-driven ANKA and AKSUNGUR, climbs above most commercial airliners, stays up for around 10 hours, and carries roughly double the bomb load of the original ANKA.

What ANKA-III Actually Does

Why the Boomerang Shape

The biggest single departure from earlier Turkish drones is the planform. A conventional aircraft has a fuselage, a wing and a tail; each surface gives a radar something to bounce off. ANKA-III has no separate fuselage and no tail — only a single sweeping wing. That layout is known as a flying wing, and it scatters radar energy in ways that drop the aircraft’s radar cross-section dramatically.

The same idea is at the heart of the American B-2 bomber, Northrop’s X-47B carrier demonstrator, China’s CH-7 stealth UCAV and Russia’s S-70 Okhotnik. With ANKA-III, Turkey joins a club that, until recently, you could count on the fingers of one hand.

ANKA-III carries its weapons inside an internal bay — two stations inside the body, plus optional external pylons under the wing for missions where stealth matters less. Hanging a bomb under the wing of a stealth aircraft cancels most of the stealth; the internal bay preserves it right up to weapon release.

Specifications

First Live Strikes: TEBER and TOLUN

The flight-test programme moved quickly. On the twelfth flight, ANKA-III released a TÜBİTAK SAGE TEBER-82 — a Turkish-made laser-guided bomb kit — and scored a direct hit on the target. A subsequent test added the ROKETSAN TOLUN mini smart munition to the cleared weapons list. In other words: the bay opens, the seeker locks, the round flies, the target is gone. Sensor-to-shooter, in software, from a flying wing.

A second prototype joined the test programme in 2024. TUSAŞ has roughly 250 engineers and technicians on the project, and is leaning heavily on AI-driven modelling and simulation to compress the certification timeline.

Why It Matters for Turkey

ANKA-III is what comes next for Turkish unmanned aviation. TB2 and the propeller ANKA worked spectacularly against opponents without modern air defence — they would have struggled against a Russian, Chinese or Israeli-grade integrated air-defence system. ANKA-III is the answer to that environment: smaller radar signature, jet speed, internal weapons, and the option to operate in pairs and packs.

Equally important is the doctrine. ANKA-III is being designed to fly alongside the human-piloted KAAN fighter — exactly the “loyal wingman” concept that the US Air Force and others have been chasing for a decade. The human pilot stays at a survivable distance while ANKA-III pushes into the contested zone, soaking up risk on behalf of a much more expensive aircraft and a much more irreplaceable person.

Internationally, fewer than half a dozen countries fly a flying-wing combat drone of any kind. Turkey joining the club is the kind of move that opens doors — for the air force, for export customers in countries that have been blocked from buying stealthy unmanned platforms elsewhere, and for the supplier ecosystem behind the aircraft.

Summary

Sources:

• TUSAŞ — ANKA-III
• Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB)
• Wikipedia — TAI Anka-3

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