By Thomas Nachtrab in collaboration with Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans

 

''Listen son – you're all great and well-educated kids, but accept the fact that foreign producers are at a level unreachable.'' (Address to Selçuk and Haluk Bayraktar by a bureaucrat at the Presidency of Defense Industries, mid-2000s) [1]

Whenever the future of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is discussed, the ability to engage and shoot down other aircraft is frequently mentioned as a development that could one day make conventional fighter aircraft obsolete. Nonetheless, actual progress towards achieving such a future has been painstakingly slow. In popular discourse, capabilities of combat UAVs are frequently thought to be way ahead of their real-world abilities, with even a global armament powerhouse such as Russia still struggling to produce its own fleet of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), let alone turning these systems into agile unmanned dogfighters in the near future.

 

Tensions have increased between Iran and Azerbaijan over road tax imposed on Iranian truck drivers that want to enter Armenia through Azerbaijan, over Azerbaijani ties to Israel and plans for a corridor linking Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan exclave with mainland Azerbaijan. The latter's occurence could see Tehran lose its connection to Armenia altogether, hindering its access to the regional market. While current tensions between Tehran and Baku have so far been confined to diplomatic tensions and military exercises along their respective borders, some fear that mounting tensions between the two countries could one day escalate into an all-out regional conflict.

 

On display alongside a host of well-known UAV designs at Teknofest 2021 there was a UAV that looks as intriguing as it does unconventional. The object that combined these two feats is the Alpkuş, a small UAV that was designed by Turkish engineer Alper Sarısan. The Alpkuş originally started its life as a simple copy of the Colomban Cri-Cri homebuilt recreational aircraft, which has the curious distinction of being the smallest twin-engined manned aircraft in the world. Somewhere during the past several years, Alper Sarısan converted his Cri-Cri for unmanned operations, adding it to a growing list of UAV designs to come from the country.

Ethiopia's last acquisition of (unmanned) aircraft before the commencement of the Tigray War in November 2020 are not the Wing Loong IIs UCAVs the country is so often reported to have deployed during the early stages of the conflict. Instead, the last (unmanned) aircraft it acquired was a single German Trinity F9 eVTOL UAV received as a gift from the German government in October 2020. [1] Although supposed to be the first of three drones that were to be donated to Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture to help it in areas of natural resources protection, only one F9 was delivered before the German Development Cooperation was halted from supplying the other two drones after the the Tigray War broke out in November 2020 [2]

By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans 

Morocco's use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been a subject shrouded in secrecy since the country first acquired drones in the late 1980s. Although this secrecy surrounds nearly all of its defence acquisitions, Morocco has taken extra care to reveal as little as possible with regards to what UAV types it purchased and where they're being deployed. But in a time when most people own camera phones and satellite imagery is readily available, an increasing amount of information about Morroco's drone operations is slowly becoming available.