HAVELSAN Grows A320 Simulator Orderbook to Six Units
HAVELSAN’s order book for Airbus A320-family full-flight simulators has grown to six additional units, the Turkish defense electronics group said on September 1, on top of five A320 devices already delivered and in operation. It is a modest-sounding number next to Türkiye’s missile and drone headlines, but it points to something the country’s defense industry talks about less often: a genuine export foothold in commercial pilot training hardware, a market long dominated by Western and a handful of specialist firms.
Six more simulators, expanding customer interest
HAVELSAN said the six new orders reflect “growing international demand” for its A320-family training devices, part of the company’s STARLINE full-flight simulator (FFS) line. All five simulators currently in service hold European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) qualification, and the company said multiple airlines and training centers are now running evaluation fly-outs on the devices to assess handling characteristics, fidelity and training effectiveness before committing to orders of their own. HAVELSAN did not name the customers behind the six new units.
The five operational units trace back to a broader HAVELSAN contract covering 11 full-flight simulators and flight training devices for Airbus A320ceo/neo and Boeing 737 MAX variants; Turkish Airlines has been the anchor customer for the program, taking delivery of A320 devices through 2024 as HAVELSAN built up its EASA Level D certification track record. The new six-unit growth in the order book suggests the company is now finding customers beyond that original anchor contract, in line with the wider narrowbody-fleet expansion airlines across Asia and the Middle East have been pursuing.
HAVELSAN was showcasing the A320 simulators at the Asia Pacific Aviation Training Summit (APATS) 2026, a venue the company is using to court regional operators as they grow their Airbus narrowbody fleets and the training capacity to support them.
A new factory to back up the order book
To handle the growth, HAVELSAN broke ground in March 2026 on a new 17,000-square-meter Simulator Production and Integration Facility in Ankara, due to become operational in 2027. The company says the site will support manufacturing more than 30 simulators a year and allow simultaneous development and integration of up to 16 devices. Combined with HAVELSAN’s existing Ankara facilities, the expanded footprint would give the company capacity to have roughly 40 commercial and military simulators in various stages of production and integration at once — a significant jump from the roughly eight units a year the company said it could manufacture as recently as 2024.
HAVELSAN frames the simulator business as a long-term relationship rather than a one-off equipment sale, emphasizing lifecycle support, maintenance packages, equipment upgrades and financing options alongside each device — the kind of aftermarket model that flight-simulator makers rely on for recurring revenue once the initial hardware sale is done.
Why it matters beyond the numbers
Full-flight simulators are a niche but demanding market: EASA Level D certification, the highest qualification tier, requires matching an aircraft’s handling and visual fidelity closely enough that airlines can run zero-flight-time type-rating training on the device instead of the aircraft itself. Established players — CAE, L3Harris and Boeing subsidiary FlightSafety among them — have historically dominated the segment. HAVELSAN’s push into that space, backed by a purpose-built factory and a genuine international customer pipeline rather than a single domestic contract, is a smaller but telling data point in Türkiye’s broader defense-industrial story: state-linked companies built on military electronics and combat systems increasingly competing for civil and dual-use business as well, using export earnings and manufacturing scale to diversify beyond weapons sales alone.
Sources: HAVELSAN official press release, AviTrader Aviation News, Halldale Group.
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