Leonardo starts assembling a Turkish combat drone in Italy, promises first delivery before year-end
Leonardo has put a date on its Turkish partnership. Speaking on the group’s second-quarter earnings call, senior executive Lorenzo Mariani said aircraft integration is under way at the LBA Systems joint venture with Baykar, and that the first air vehicle will be handed to a customer before the end of 2026. Assembly is running at Leonardo’s Ronchi dei Legionari plant, and the product is Astore Levante — a European build of Baykar’s carrier-capable Bayraktar TB3.
At a Glance
- Who: LBA Systems, a 50-50 joint venture between Italy’s Leonardo and Turkey’s Baykar, headquartered in Italy.
- What is new: Aircraft integration has started; first customer delivery is promised before the end of 2026.
- Where: Leonardo’s Ronchi dei Legionari facility in Friuli-Venezia Giulia.
- First product: Astore Levante, based on the Bayraktar TB3 and fitted with Leonardo mission systems, sensors and payloads for European requirements.
- Customer: An Italian end user, not publicly identified.
- Next up: TB2, AKINCI and KIZILELMA are all slated for production at Italian sites.
From press release to production line
When Leonardo and Baykar declared LBA Systems fully operational at the Farnborough International Airshow in July, the announcement was mostly administrative: regulatory clearances at Italian and European level were complete and the leadership was in place. What was missing was a schedule. Mariani supplied one, describing the venture as a priority programme whose timeline sits directly under management control — a pointed contrast with European defence projects that spend years waiting on intergovernmental decisions.
The governance is worth restating. Baykar chief executive Haluk Bayraktar chairs the venture; Leonardo’s Francesco Sabatini runs it. Ownership is split down the middle. Neither side is a subcontractor to the other, and that structure is the real departure from how Turkish defence exports have usually worked — finished platforms sold across a border, with integration and support kept at home.
Astore Levante: a European passport for the TB3
The aircraft unveiled at Farnborough keeps the TB3 airframe — folding wings, short-deck take-off and landing, a capability already demonstrated from the Turkish amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu — and layers Leonardo’s mission systems, sensors, payloads and certification work on top. The target market is naval: European fleets that operate light carriers or amphibious ships and cannot bankroll a fixed-wing fighter detachment to fill the deck.
That is a larger customer set than it first appears. Several NATO navies face the same arithmetic — a flight deck without an air group is an expensive hull — and a medium-weight unmanned aircraft that can launch and recover without catapults or arresting gear answers the question at a fraction of the cost of an F-35B squadron.
The baseline: Bayraktar TB3 (manufacturer figures)
| Class | Carrier-capable unmanned combat aerial vehicle |
| Wingspan | about 14 metres, folding |
| Length | about 8.35 metres |
| Maximum take-off weight | about 1,450 kg |
| Payload | about 280 kg |
| Endurance | 24-hour class |
| Engine | TEI PD-170 turbodiesel, Turkish-built |
| Distinguishing feature | Short-deck take-off and landing, proven from TCG Anadolu |
| European configuration | Leonardo mission systems, sensor and payload integration |
The rest of the family follows
LBA Systems has said it intends to build the wider Baykar range in Italy across three sites: Astore Levante and the jet-powered KIZILELMA at Leonardo facilities, the TB2 and AKINCI at Baykar’s own Italian plant. A Turkish-designed stealth-shaped jet UCAV entering a production line inside a European Union member state would have been a difficult sentence to write three years ago.
The commercial logic is not subtle. As Brussels ties defence funding ever more tightly to production inside the bloc, the fastest route into those programmes is to manufacture there. An aircraft assembled by an Italian company under Italian law does not have to argue about origin rules. What remains untested is the schedule: Leonardo has promised a delivery in the final weeks of the year, and defence first-deliveries slip routinely. This one, however, involves a mature airframe, an existing line and clearances already granted.
Sources
- Defence Industry Europe — Leonardo CEO on Baykar venture integration in Italy, 16 August 2026
- Leonardo — LBA Systems joint venture reaches full operational readiness, 21 July 2026
- Naval News — LBA Systems debuts Astore Levante at Farnborough
- Baykar — Bayraktar TB3 technical data
