Turkish Aerospace’s (TUSAŞ) stealth UAV for deep strike missions, ANKA-3, is expected to resume its ground tests on soon. The UAV’s first mission will be to perform deep strike operations. According to unconfirmed News, the UAV will also perform air refuelling missions thanks to its tailless airframe.
Anka-3 will have many options. It may fly in Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) along with the Turkish Fighter KAAN. TUSAŞ also develops the OKU (Autonomous Formation Flight) concept for such missions. The UAV may fire missiles or release ammunition at deep strike missions such as Super Şimşek and SOM-J as it is a stealth aircraft with high payload capacity.
The U.S. developed the XQ-58A Valkyrie for deep attack missions.
ANKA-3’s tailless airframe allows the aircraft to have a wide body structure. This structure is used for air refuelling missions. The U.S., for instance, uses MQ-25 Stingray as a tanker UAV.
ANKA-3 will have 6500 KG MTOW, with 1200kg Payload capacity. It will reach 40 000 feet maximum altitude. Its endurance will be 10 hours at an altitude of 30,000 feet. The UCAV’s cruise speed will be 250 Kts, and the maximum speed will be 425 Kts.
The first flight of ANKA-3 was expected to take place in May or June. TurDef has learned that ground tests were halted due to some technical difficulties experienced in positioning control surfaces. The UAV was performing its high-speed test on the ground, just before taking off- New sets of systems are currently being developed to solve the problem. Once the new systems' reliability is tested, the UAV will resume its ground tests and will take off soon after
This is TurDef’s exclusive News. It can be republished by referring to TurDef.
