Drone carriers: Turkey and China are close to commissioning their first ships

With Turkey and China, the first countries will soon put a drone carrier into service, and others are likely to follow shortly. The background: drones are becoming ever more important in military operations. Numerous armies have therefore already set up their own drone units – and the topic has now reached naval forces as well.

Viennese pioneering work by Schiebel

For decades, warships have increasingly used drones to monitor the sea areas around them. The real pioneer, still the undisputed market leader today, is based of all places in Vienna: Schiebel. Its Camcopter S-100 was conceived in the mid-1990s; the unmanned aircraft is built in Wiener Neustadt and now operates on all the world's oceans.

The “flying eye” from Austria, for example, monitors fishing rights or detects environmental offences such as the dumping of waste oil at sea – far more environmentally friendly and cheaper than a helicopter or even a ship. The unmanned helicopter, weighing up to 200 kilograms, needs only a small flight deck as a helipad, usually at the stern of a fairly small ship, a frigate or a corvette; it can also operate from land bases or larger units.

The French Navy, for instance, integrated and qualified the system on its amphibious helicopter carrier Dixmude (Mistral class) in 2019. And together with Thales, the Austrians now also supply the British Royal Navy with their aircraft.

Ankara fields the first drone carrier

A Turkish ship of comparable class is now likely to take the next step shortly: a ship-based unmanned squadron of fixed-wing drones. In April last year, Turkey commissioned its largest warship to date, the multi-purpose amphibious assault ship “TCG Anadolu”, which has since served as the flagship of the Turkish Navy.

The ship was originally planned as a platform for a squadron of F-35B fighters from Lockheed Martin. Since Turkey was excluded from the F-35 programme because of its purchase of the Russian S-400 air defence system, Ankara is making a virtue of necessity: a squadron of domestically built unmanned attack drones is now to be stationed on board.

The TB3 follows a successful TB2

For this purpose, Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar Technologies is developing the Bayraktar TB3. Following successful and spectacular deployments of its Bayraktar TB2 drones – in Libya, the Caucasus and Ukraine, among other places – Baykar is now regarded worldwide as a recognised authority in the industry.

Described as a “medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drone on a small budget”, the TB2 has proven its effectiveness above all against military targets – unlike its US counterpart, the Predator, or the Israeli Heron, which are primarily geared towards fighting terrorists and rebel groups. The research platform ORYX credits it with 884 destroyed weapon systems to date: main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems and rocket launchers, air defence, radars, aircraft, helicopters and fast attack boats.

It is known that the TB3 is derived from the TB2 and adopts its aerodynamic layout. Yet everything about the drone is new: it has more power, is faster, flies higher and further and can carry more weight. It is powered by a 172 hp turbodiesel from Turkish engine manufacturer TEI. A novelty for drones of the medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) class are the TB3's folding wings: they reduce the span of no less than 14 metres to a size that is practical for shipboard operations.

The very rapidly completed flight test programme shows how much experience Baykar Technologies has with MALE drone technology. In barely ten months, an endurance of 32 hours, a range of 5,700 kilometres and an altitude of 11,155 metres were demonstrated – excellent figures across the board for the MALE class. Test flights via the “ski jump”, from which the TB3 will in future take off from the deck of the “TCG Anadolu”, have also already begun.

China's shipyard on the Yangtze

However, Turkey is not the only country with a drone carrier in preparation. An Airbus reconnaissance satellite recently took a photo of one of China's newest warships. It was captured at the Jiangsu Dayang naval shipyard on the Yangtze – presumably it is China's first drone carrier.

So far, only the approximate size is known and the fact that initial sea trials are under way. At around 100 metres long, 28 metres wide and with a 16.5-metre-wide runway, the ship would in any case be too small for an aircraft carrier, but there is enough space for drone take-offs and landings.

In early May, China also celebrated the opening of a drone factory of the Chengdu Aerospace Corporation. Up to 200 MALE drones of the Wing Loong (Yilong) family are to be produced each year in the highly automated plant. While a US MALE of the MQ-9 Reaper type costs around 30 million euros apiece, a price of only around one million euros is quoted for a Wing Loong. Demand is correspondingly high – Nigeria, for example, also operates armed Wing Long IIs.

MALE defence gains in importance

MALE drones are not wonder weapons, however, as has been shown not only in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. After initial successes in the battles for Kyiv and Snake Island, Ukraine no longer sends Bayraktar TB2s into the combat zone.

The Houthi movement has published video of them shooting down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone with a surface-to-air missile, showing them using aerial reconnaissance drones of their own to track the American military hardware before taking it out of the sky. pic.twitter.com/rc3lKvlxFo

Russia, for its part, has withdrawn its comparable systems after losing many MALE drones of the Forpost type (a licensed copy of the Israeli IAI Searcher). Both sides, Russia and Ukraine alike, now doubt whether MALE drones can survive against well-developed air defence systems. Other armies have recently had similar experiences: Israel, for example, lost two Hermes-900 MALEs in southern Lebanon within eight days in early June, and the US also lost several MQ-9 Reapers last year.

These setbacks are unlikely to halt the trend towards drone carriers and the growing use of such drone systems in navies, however. Rather, it can be expected that, after Turkey and China, other countries will soon commission such ships as well.