Bayraktar TB2: Programme Status, Operators and Exports

The Bayraktar TB2 is still in production, still being exported and still the aircraft most of Baykar’s customers actually fly — but it is not the aircraft it was in 2020. The Canadian targeting turret that made it famous has a Turkish replacement, its Austrian engine has a Turkish successor in flight test, and from 2026 a second final-assembly line for the type sits inside the European Union. Baykar says 36 countries have signed export agreements for the TB2 and that the fleet has passed 1,250,000 operational flight hours. This page tracks what the programme is today, who flies it, what it costs and where the remaining foreign dependencies are.

What the TB2 actually is

The TB2 is a 700 kg propeller-driven armed UAV with a 12 m wingspan, a 150 kg payload and an endurance Baykar states as “18+ hours”. It carries up to four light precision munitions — in Turkish service, ROKETSAN’s MAM-L and MAM-C — and is flown from a ground control station over line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight datalinks. Baykar publishes a 27-hour 3-minute endurance record and a service ceiling of 20,000 ft, with an operational altitude of 16,000 ft.

Those numbers matter less than the class they define. The TB2 is not an MQ-9 competitor and was never priced as one; it sits a category below, at roughly a tenth of the Reaper’s weight. What it offers a buyer is a complete, self-contained armed reconnaissance system — aircraft, ground station, munitions, training, support — in a package that middle-income air forces can afford and operate without foreign contractors on site. That combination, rather than any single specification, is what produced the export record examined in our analysis of why countries actually buy Turkish drones.

The part that gets missed: the TB2 has been rebuilt from the inside

Most English-language writing about the TB2 still describes the aircraft as it was configured in 2020. That description is out of date, and the reason is a sequence of export-control events that is worth setting out in order, because it is the single best-documented case of what happens when a foreign supplier switches off a Turkish programme.

On 5 October 2020, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs suspended all relevant export permits to Türkiye. The trigger, in Global Affairs Canada’s own words in its published review, was a briefing “regarding the possible export of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with Canadian sensors to Azerbaijan”, following the appearance of wreckage bearing a Canadian sensor tag in Nagorno-Karabakh. The item in question was the L3Harris WESCAM MX-15D electro-optical and infrared turret, which that review notes was listed in Baykar’s own product catalogue as the exclusive sensor technology for its UAVs.

The review that followed concluded there was credible evidence Canadian sensors on Turkish UAVs had been used in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya and Syria, and the associated permits were cancelled in April 2021. Baykar’s answer was already flying: in November 2020, a TB2 fitted with ASELSAN’s CATS (Common Aperture Targeting System) turret designated a target for a ROKETSAN MAM-L in a live firing. A domestic supply agreement between Baykar and ASELSAN followed, and CATS-equipped TB2s entered Turkish service. Envanter Medya has a detailed Turkish-language account of the WESCAM MX-15 and the Canadian export crisis for readers who want the sensor-level history.

Here is the part that almost never gets reported alongside the substitution story: Canada lifted the restrictions in January 2024, and Canadian EO/IR sensor shipments to Türkiye resumed from the summer of that year. Project Ploughshares, the Canadian NGO whose 2020 report helped trigger the original review, reported in September 2025 that Türkiye received C$107.8 million in Canadian military goods during 2024, making it one of the largest non-US recipients, and that “since 2024, Canada has transferred more than $100 million worth of targeting systems alone to the country”. So the honest 2026 position is not “Türkiye replaced the Canadian turret”. It is that Türkiye built a domestic alternative, proved it, and then also got its original supplier back — which leaves the TB2 with two sources for its most export-sensitive component rather than none.

Subsystem sourcing: 2020 against 2026

Compiled by DefenceTürkiye from Baykar’s published TB2 specification, Global Affairs Canada’s export-permit review, Leonardo’s 21 July 2026 statement and dated reporting cited in the Sources section. Where a figure is not public, the table says so rather than estimating.

Who operates the TB2

Baykar’s chairman Selçuk Bayraktar stated on 3 February 2026 that the company had signed export agreements covering 36 countries for the TB2 and 16 for the Bayraktar AKINCI, across 37 customer states in total, with company-wide exports of US$2.2 billion in 2025 on US$2.5 billion of revenue. Baykar’s own website now gives a group figure of 39 export countries and more than 1,000 UAVs delivered.

Two cautions belong on those numbers. First, an export agreement is not a delivery: several of the 36 are signed contracts with aircraft still to arrive, and Baykar does not publish a per-country delivery table. Second, the country counts are group figures that mix platforms, so they cannot be read as a TB2 fleet list. Envanter Medya maintains a country-by-country Turkish-language list of TB2 operators that is the most granular open compilation available, and separates confirmed operators from reported ones.

The contracts that can be verified against a published value or an official announcement are the ones a buyer should benchmark against:

• Poland — 4 systems, 24 aircraft, contract signed May 2021 at US$270 million. Baykar announced the final delivery on 16 May 2024 and described it as the first Turkish UCAV export completed to a state that is both a NATO and an EU member. First batch delivered October 2022 to Poland’s 12th Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Base.
• Romania — 3 systems, 18 aircraft, US$321 million, published on the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily on 25 April 2023, for the Romanian Land Forces with basing at Timișoara.
• Kuwait — US$367 million, announced June 2023, negotiated directly between the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defence and the Turkish side. The contract covers support equipment, ground tests, logistics, aircrew and technician training, a simulator and three years of technical support and spares.
• Ukraine — an operator since 2019, and the campaign that made the type internationally famous in 2022.

Eight NATO members other than Türkiye now hold contracts for Turkish defence equipment, several of them for the TB2; the alliance-wide picture is set out in our guide to which NATO members operate Turkish defence systems.

Price, and why there is no single answer

Baykar does not publish a flyaway price for the TB2, and no customer has published one either. What exists is contract-level arithmetic, and it has to be read carefully. Poland’s US$270 million bought 24 aircraft — about US$11.25 million per airframe if you divide, which nobody should. Romania’s US$321 million bought 18 aircraft, about US$17.8 million each on the same crude basis. The two figures differ by 58 per cent for the same aircraft type, which tells you the division is meaningless: these are system contracts covering ground stations, munitions, spares, simulators, training and multi-year support in different proportions.

The Kuwaiti contract makes the point explicitly. Its published scope lists support equipment, ground testing, logistics maintenance, pilot and technician training, guaranteed spares availability, a simulation system and three years of technical support — before any aircraft is counted. Estimates in the US$5 million range that circulate for a bare TB2 originate largely in 2022 crowdfunding campaigns rather than in any contract, and should be treated as exactly that.

Limitations, stated plainly

It is not a contested-airspace aircraft. The TB2’s Ukrainian record divides sharply into two periods. In 2022 it was decisive against columns and unprotected logistics. By late 2023 it was not: Defense News reported in October 2023 that improved Russian layered air defence and electronic warfare had pushed the type into a much narrower role, with sorties reduced to short observation flights. The open-source tracker Oryx, which counts only visually confirmed losses, had documented 26 TB2s destroyed in Ukraine by February 2025 — a floor, not a total. A slow, non-stealthy 700 kg aircraft at 16,000 ft is survivable against irregular forces and against states without functioning air defence, and is not survivable against a peer. That is a statement about the category, not about Baykar’s engineering.

The engine question is open. The TM100 is a genuine Turkish achievement — a 100 hp aviation piston engine developed domestically with components from more than forty Turkish suppliers, flown on a TB2 with the second test announced on 19 April 2025. But Baykar has not stated when it replaces the Rotax 912 in serial aircraft, or whether export customers can specify it. Until that is public, the baseline TB2 still leaves Türkiye through an Austrian powerplant. The wider propulsion picture is covered in our survey of who builds Türkiye’s aircraft engines.

The sensor independence is real but partial. ASELSAN does not publish CATS weight or performance figures, so an outside assessment of how the Turkish turret compares with the MX-15D is not possible from open sources. That Canadian sensors returned to the supply chain in 2024 suggests the commercial case for the original turret survived the substitution.

The figures are the manufacturer’s. The 1,250,000 flight hours, the 36 export agreements and the 39-country group total are Baykar’s own statements, restated periodically and not independently audited. Baykar is privately held and does not publish accounts, which is why it does not appear in the Defense News Top 100 despite its export volume — a point examined in our Baykar company profile.

Where the TB2 sits in Baykar’s line-up now

Baykar now fields four combat-capable unmanned types, and it is a common error to read them as a succession. The TB2 is the volume tactical aircraft. The AKINCI is a far larger high-altitude platform carrying cruise missiles and air-to-air munitions. The TB3 is a folding-wing derivative built for short take-off and recovery from TCG ANADOLU, which is a naval requirement rather than a TB2 replacement. The KIZILELMA is a jet-powered unmanned fighter in a different class entirely.

Nothing in that line-up displaces the TB2’s role. A state that needs persistent armed reconnaissance over its own territory at a price it can sustain still wants a TB2, and Baykar continues to sell it. What has changed is the company’s centre of gravity: Selçuk Bayraktar named production and KIZILELMA’s entry into inventory as Baykar’s 2026 priorities, and the company’s recent announcements are dominated by KIZILELMA and AKINCI weapons milestones rather than by the TB2.

An EU-built TB2

On 21 July 2026 Leonardo and Baykar announced that LBA Systems, their 50/50 joint venture headquartered in Italy, had reached full operational readiness. The venture’s product range covers six systems including the TB2 in two variants. Leonardo’s statement assigns TB2 and AKINCI manufacture to “Baykar’s plant in Italy”, with Astore Levante and KIZILELMA production at Leonardo’s own sites.

For a European buyer this changes the procurement conversation more than any specification would: it converts the TB2 from an import into something that can be presented as European industrial participation. It also introduces a second export-control jurisdiction over the type, which is the kind of detail that only becomes visible when a licence is refused. The corporate structure behind it — Baykar’s acquisition of Piaggio Aerospace and the Leonardo relationship — is set out in our Baykar company profile.

What comes next

Four things would move this page. A disclosed serial cut-in date for the TM100, which would close the last named foreign dependency in the baseline aircraft. First aircraft off the Italian line, which would make the EU assembly claim real rather than announced. A published customer delivery breakdown, which Baykar has never provided. And any statement on how long TB2 production continues alongside TB3, which is the question every existing operator will eventually have to ask about spares and support.

The broader question of how much of the TB2 — and of Turkish defence generally — is genuinely Turkish is examined separately in our assessment of how independent Türkiye’s defence production actually is. The TB2 is the clearest case on the optimistic side of that ledger, and even it is not finished.

FAQ

How many countries operate the Bayraktar TB2?

Baykar stated on 3 February 2026 that it had signed TB2 export agreements with 36 countries, within a group total of 37 customer states at that date; the company’s website now gives 39 export countries across all products. Those are agreements, not confirmed deliveries, and Baykar does not publish a per-country delivery breakdown.

How much does a Bayraktar TB2 cost?

No flyaway price is published by Baykar or by any customer. Published contract values include US$270 million for Poland’s 24 aircraft (2021) and US$321 million for Romania’s 18 (2023). The gap between those two per-aircraft figures shows that they are system contracts including ground stations, munitions, training and support, not unit prices.

Does the Bayraktar TB2 still use Canadian sensors?

Some aircraft can. Canada suspended and then cancelled the relevant export permits in 2020–21, and Baykar shifted to ASELSAN’s CATS turret, first used in a live firing in November 2020. Canada lifted the restrictions in January 2024 and sensor shipments resumed. Both options therefore exist in 2026, and a buyer should establish which turret a specific offer carries.

Does the TB2 have a Turkish engine?

It has one in flight test. Baykar’s own TM100, a 100 hp piston engine, flew on a TB2 with the second test flight announced on 19 April 2025. Baykar has not disclosed when it replaces the Austrian Rotax 912 in serial production, so the baseline aircraft still uses the imported engine.

Is the Bayraktar TB2 still relevant after Ukraine?

It depends entirely on the threat. Against peer air defence and electronic warfare the type’s utility fell sharply from 2023, as Defense News and Ukrainian reporting documented. Against irregular forces and states without functioning integrated air defence — which describes most of its customer base — it remains effective and continues to sell.

Is the TB2 being replaced by the TB3?

Not directly. The TB3 is a folding-wing aircraft designed to operate from TCG ANADOLU, which is a naval requirement the TB2 was never built for. Baykar continues to market and produce both, and the TB2 remains in the LBA Systems product range announced in July 2026.

Where is the Bayraktar TB2 built?

In Türkiye, and from 2026 also at Baykar’s plant in Italy under the LBA Systems joint venture with Leonardo, announced as fully operational on 21 July 2026.

Sources

• Baykar, Bayraktar TB2 product page — specifications, flight-hour total, munition types
• Baykar, corporate figures — export countries, UAVs delivered, workforce
• Baykar, Poland receives final TB2 delivery, 18 May 2024
• Baykar, Romania awards $321 million TB2 contract, April 2023
• Global Affairs Canada, Final Report: Review of Export Permits to Türkiye (PDF)
• CBC News, Canada cancels permits for high-tech arms exports to Turkey, April 2021
• Defense News, Kuwait to buy Turkish-made TB2 drones in $367 million deal, 14 June 2023
• Defense News, Romania awards $321 million contract for Turkish TB2 combat drones, 25 April 2023
• Defense News, Are the once-vaunted Bayraktar drones losing their shine in Ukraine?, 31 October 2023
• Anadolu Agency, TB2 completes second test flight with Baykar-made TM100 engine, 19 April 2025
• Leonardo, LBA Systems JV achieves full operational readiness, 21 July 2026
• Daily Sabah, TB2 test-fires local munition using Turkish electro-optical system, November 2020
• Türkiye Today, Baykar sets $2.2B export record, 3 February 2026 — Selçuk Bayraktar’s country and revenue figures
• Project Ploughshares, Canada’s soaring arms exports: what the 2024 numbers reveal, 29 September 2025 — resumed Canadian targeting-sensor transfers to Türkiye