Did Turkey Just Made Fighter Pilots Obsolete with A.I Pilots?

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Hey there, Josh here.

So something pretty wild just happened in Turkey, and I wanted to break it down because it shows where military technology is heading.

On December 27th, a company called Baykar took two unmanned fighter jets out for a test flight. But here's the crazy part: nobody was flying them. Not a single pilot anywhere. The two jets took off on their own, flew in perfect formation next to each other, made coordinated turns, and completed an entire patrol mission—all using computer algorithms that the engineering team programmed ahead of time.

Why is this a big deal?

Unmanned drones have been around for years. You've probably heard about them. But they've always needed someone controlling them—either someone in the cockpit remotely flying them, or someone telling them what to do. What just happened in Turkey is different. These jets are called KIZILELMA (which means "Red Apple" in Turkish), and they figured out how to make them work together without any human telling them what to do moment by moment.

Think of it like this: instead of a pilot flying a plane, imagine you program a set of rules that say "stay this far from the other plane, match my speed, when I turn, you turn too." The jets used special software to follow those rules perfectly while flying in super tight formation.

The jets that did it

The two aircraft that pulled off this maneuver were prototypes (early test versions), named PT3 and PT5. They took off one after the other from a test center in northwestern Turkey. Once in the air, they flew alongside each other so close they looked like wingmen—you know, like fighter jets do in the movies. Except no one was telling them how to do it. Their onboard computers were handling everything.

During the same test, they also flew a combat patrol mission. That means they flew along a planned route over a specific area—the kind of thing military jets do to keep watch over airspace. They did all of it autonomously.

What does this mean for the future?

Right now, this isn't about replacing pilots tomorrow. What Turkey is actually showing is that multiple unmanned jets can coordinate with each other and operate as a team. Imagine instead of sending out one drone, you send out five or ten flying together, all working together without needing people to control each one individually. That's the future this test is pointing toward.

The KIZILELMA jets are designed to work from aircraft carriers (ships with runways on them), and they can carry weapons and advanced radar. They cruise at speeds around 640 miles per hour and can fly for more than three hours. Future versions are going to be even faster.

The bigger picture

This actually comes just one month after KIZILELMA made another first: in November, it became the first unmanned fighter jet ever to shoot down another aircraft using an air-to-air missile. So Turkey's been having a pretty historic month in unmanned aviation.

The cool part about this technology is that it could change how militaries operate. Instead of needing a pilot for every jet, you could have a small team of operators managing multiple aircraft all at once. That means fewer people in danger and more capability in the air.

None of this happens overnight, but what Turkey just showed is that the technology is way further along than most people realize. Coordinated teams of unmanned aircraft aren't science fiction anymore—they're something engineers can actually build and test today.

Pretty interesting stuff for keeping an eye on.