Well, In another context, I never commented in this thread, so I wanna ask you about your countries Airforce fleet philosophy. Iam not asking about weapons whether your country genuinely r&d'ed them or not but iam asking about overall planning. Why did your country jump directly to twin-engine 5th gen fighter jet, when even if they are locally procured they can be expensive. Even if they cost only 10M$ hypothetically, they will cost a lot for maintenance. TAF fleet mainly consists of F-16 as of now. Any AirForce generally has a Workhorse+Flagship. In USAF case that is F-16+F-15 in previous generation and F-35+F-22/6th-GEN in present generation but an all F-35 fleet like USAF is unaffordable for many countries. So like China is still producing J-10 which is its main workhorse while J-20 is its main flagship, India is also planning same Tejas as workhorse and AMCA as Flagship. TAF would also like that i presume unless you guys gonna replace all Single-Engine F-16 workhorses with KAAN which is expensive to maintain. Or are you guys planning on using drones or loyal Kizilelma or HurJet as Workhorse? .Iam not understanding your AF philosophy. Had they invested in a cheap KF-21 esque single engine plane to replace F-16 ironically on which you guys were swindled 20B$, you guys would have replaced every F-16 with domestic equivalent plane(Iam not contesting about your capability to develop) and then proceed to twin engine flagship. Tldr-Why did your country go directly to a twin engine flagship rather not a workhorse to replace the liability F-16 which Americunts are holding you by balls. This is a genuine question not trolling.
Turkish airforce was aiming to have 100 f-35a to replace f-4s and increase the number of aircraft.
TFX was planned in 2011 to replace f-16s gradually. So from start air force was looking to have 250 TFX and 100 f-35 around 2035-2040.
TFX was planned as a competitor to raptor from start(for air superiority roles in mind).
When we get kicked out of f-35 , air force wanted to have TFX fastly ,in a smaller time frame than planned.
By this time, UAVs and ucavs and royal wingman concept arisen.
Our air force is looking now to have 350-400 manned fighters 250 -300 TFX and 100-150 f-16)
To keep f-16 more in service, we are applying life extension to them and we are modernizing them to viper levels.mor ever,to compensate air craft deficiency due f-4s being obsolete, we are buying 40 f-16s and planning to buy 40 eurofighter typhoon.
Additionally, we will have around 300-400 UAVs,acavs and loyal wingmans.
Additionally, air force may want to have light fighter version of hurjet.
Basically, our air force wanted to have twin engine air superiority fighter from the beginning.