Bayraktar TB2

TR-TB2
 Turkey
UAV - Operations - Military

26 December 2020
10:54 UTC

Aircraft
Bayraktar
Other countries apart from Turkey, with TB2s would appear to include (in alphabetical order)And odd ones

 
 

CommentI'm beginning to suspect there are two drones with mode-s address 001071 active. We already seen drones with that address being tested at Keşan airport while later a drone with the same mode-s address was active well over 1,000 km away. So far we've never seen two active drones with the same 24-bit address -- something I doubt we'll ever see -- but given the distances and the specifications of the Bayraktar as far a we know them, it's unlikely if not impossible for this to be one drone.
The screen-prints don't show it but 001071 was active near the Syrian border around 11:30 UTC and then appears over North Iraq around 13:00 UTC. This would mean it covered over 600 km -- the distance between Aleppo and Erbil is 618 km -- in 90 minutes. Even if we allow for an interval of 2 hours it's still not possible for a Bayraktar with a maximum speed of 220 km/h to cover that distance.
Apart from that there's the issue of the ground stations. Line-of-sight is required for communication with a Bayraktar drone. For the drones traveling the length of the Aegean coast one can imagine a series of control stations or trucks dotted along the coast at intervals of several hundred kilometres. There you have the advantage that there's very little to obstruct your view of a drone that is flying mostly over the open sea. But given the mountainous terrain and the accessibility it's hard to imagine such a scenario in this case.
I think the main point here is that we or more specifically I don't know enough about the specifications of the TB2 -- for example I suspect the engines of some of them have been upgraded -- and how they are operated to definitively say what the story is here. For now I'm going to assume the above is about right and that there are now two 001071 active although never at the same time.

Operations
 TR-TB2 (2825)
TR-TB2
Turkish Bayraktar drone.
 TCT (290)
 
Turkish Air Force Bayraktar TB2

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