Leonardo and Baykar sign joint venture on UAS technologies

While the Leonardo and Baykar JV will initially focus its efforts on the Baykar Akıncı MALE UAS (pictured), it is already looking at what comes next with a new prototype expected to be revealed in about 12 months. (Baykar)

Italy's Leonardo and Türkiye's Baykar are to establish a fifty-fifty joint venture (JV) related to the development of technologies for unmanned aircraft systems (UASs).

Signed by the CEO of Leonardo, Roberto Cingolani, and the CEO of Baykar, Haluk Bayraktar, on 6 March, the memorandum of understanding (MOU) will see the JV leverage the mission systems, payloads, and certification process of Leonardo into Baykar's portfolio of UASs.

“There is a very strong technology synergy between what we do [at Leonardo] and what they do [at Baykar]. If we combine our payloads in combination with their wide portfolio of machines, we can cover essentially all kinds of needs and missions for [Italian and Turkish] national defence and for European defence,” Cingolani said.

“We have integrated Leonardo advanced radar systems onto our platforms in the past, but the synergy and chemistry between the [two companies] somehow magically aligned with the geostrategic shifts in the world over the last four months, and we saw that opportunity to build the future air supremacy of the world [together],” the chairman of the board and chief technology officer at Baykar, Selçuk Bayraktar, said.