Commendable feat indeed.
Can an aircraft body be designed and finalised without a final decision on the engine type? Or has engine been already decided and would be integrated later?
General Electric F110 for the initial batch, This was chosen b/c Turkey has extensive experience with this engine, b/c its the same one thats used on F-16s that Turkey flies. If Im not mistaken its also license produced by the
Tusaş Engine Industries(TEI) in Turkey and there are maintanence facilities for the engine as well.. So great familiarity all around. Their plan is to build a domestic engine that is a drop in replacement for the F110, by TEI based on the F110.
There is also a few alternative plans, to build a next gen engine with Rolls Royce, RR currently does not have an engine in this class, but is trying to develop one for the Tempest, this project is being worked on by a different company KALE.
The third option, according to Ismail Demir(the man in charge of the project) talks were held with an undisclosed third country for the sale of engines, If I had to speculate there are only 2 other countries that have engine of this class, one being the Russian's
Saturn izdeliye 30(proposed engine for the Su-57) thought I think this one is unlikely to have been the country, as there are issues between Russia and NATO currently, and things have been sanctioned, on the other hand b/c Russia is quickly seeing itself being frozen out in defense sales, its much more enthusiastic to find partners to coproduce and sell and share high tech like the Izdeliye 30. The more likely source though is China, which does not have the same level of tensions that Russia does, and so far their defense industry exports are not sanctioned. China is currently developing the Xian WS-15 for its J-20.
I have noticed that since the F-35 situation, the Altay, and the t129 engine export waiver for Pakistan situation, Turkey has changed the way it does procurement and platform development, before it used to find the best in class ideal option and plan around that. It picked the f-35, the MTU powerplant for Altay and the LHTEC T800 for the T129, but b/c the F-35 got cancelled over the S-400 procurement, and the MTU powerplant for the Altay for banned b/c of operations in syria against the PKK and the T129 export got denied to Pakistan b/c the US had tensions with pakistan and refused to give the LHTEC T800 export waiver. The Turkish procurement has changed, now every project is designed from the beginning to be able to pivot on contingencies, like the Kizilelma and other Bayraktar drone projects, using several different engines in development, and sourcing the engines from Ukraine(a strategic partner country much less likely to embargo) for the Kizilelma, rather than from the US, UK, France or Germany, which may have more advanced and newer engine designs than Ukraine. Same situation with the Attack Helicopter TAI T929, rather than use the US General Electric T700 powerplant used on the Apache,which is probably the ideal choice, the choice was instead made to go with the TV3-117 used on the Russian Mi-28 that the Ukrainians also produce, whcih won't have the same export hassles or potential for embargo..
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