Posted BY: Bill | NwoReport
- Turkey is close to commissioning its largest warship, the amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu.
- The ship was meant to operate with F-35B jets, but the US kicked Turkey out of the F-35 program.
- Turkey will instead operate the Anadolu with drones, using them to project power across the region.
Turkey is getting closer to commissioning its first aircraft carrier, TCG Anadolu. In January, Ankara announced that the ship had begun its acceptance trials, capping off a nearly decade-long development cycle marked by unfortunate delays.
The ship, which is to be Turkey’s flagship, will bolster the Turkish military’s force-projection and expeditionary capabilities and will make Turkey one of the few countries with a domestically built aircraft carrier.
But Anadolu will be more than Turkey’s first carrier. It will also be the world’s first flattop with an air wing made up mostly of unmanned aircraft.
The US kicked Turkey out of the F-35 program in 2019, leaving Ankara without fighter jets for its new carrier. But Turkish officials were determined to operate fixed-wing aircraft aboard Anadolu and have turned to Turkey’s increasingly capable drone industry to fill in the gap.
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No F-35s
At 757 feet long, 105 feet wide, and with a displacement of 27,436 tons, Anadolu will be the Turkish Navy’s largest warship. It has a top speed of 20.5 knots, a range of 9,000 nautical miles, and can operate at sea for 50 days.
Strictly speaking, Anadolu is not a dedicated aircraft carrier but an amphibious assault ship — specifically a landing helicopter dock, or LHD. Its design is based on Spanish shipbuilder Navantia’s Juan Carlos I-class, which is also the basis for Australia’s two Canberra-class LHDs. A second Turkish LHD, which will be named TCG Trakya, is also planned.
Anadolu was ordered in 2015, laid down in February 2018, and launched in April 2019. Its commissioning was scheduled for 2021 but has been delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
If The Turks had any common sense, they would be putting their brains and their money into missile systems. I’m afraid the Aircraft carrier has gone the way of the Dodo bird. or it will very soon.