Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu visited Turkey on an official invitation in May, meeting Turkish Defence Minister Yasar Güler and Turkish Air Force Commander General Ziya Cemal Kadioglu at Güler’s office in Ankara. The high-level dialogue covered bilateral defence cooperation and regional security, with Pakistani media reporting that KAAN delivery timelines were among the topics raised.
ACM Sidhu’s delegation also visited the Turkish Air Force Headquarters during the trip, which coincided with the EFES-2026 Combined Joint Live-Fire Exercise – an event in which Pakistan is participating alongside other partner nations.
The Ankara meetings are the latest in a decade-long sequence of engagement in which Turkey has consistently signalled its readiness to deepen defence-industrial ties with Pakistan – often more explicitly than Islamabad has reciprocated. The trajectory begins with two landmark deals signed in rapid succession in 2018: a $1.5 billion contract for four MILGEM-class corvettes with technology transfer and co-production at Karachi Shipyard, and a separate $1.5 billion deal for 30 T-129 ATAK attack helicopters that Turkey described as the largest single export in its defence industry’s history.
The MILGEM program delivered. PNS Babur was commissioned in September 2023, PNS Khaibar followed in December 2025, and PNS Badr and PNS Tariq were built at Karachi Shipyard under the technology transfer arrangement.
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The T-129 collapsed. The US refused to issue an export licence for the helicopter’s LHTEC T800 engine – a consequence of Washington’s sanctions posture toward Turkey over the S-400 purchase. Pakistan extended the delivery window repeatedly before DG ISPR stated in January 2022 that Pakistan had “moved on” and confirmed negotiations with China for attack helicopters.
The KAAN fifth-generation fighter program has followed a pattern closer to the T-129’s drawn-out trajectory than to the MILGEM’s execution. In February 2022, TUSAŞ CEO Temel Kotil called the KAAN a “Turkish-Pakistani fighter programme.” In August 2023, Turkish Deputy Defence Minister Celal Sami Tüfekçi revealed that 200 Pakistani engineers were already working on the program and said Ankara would formally discuss including Pakistan.
In September 2024, President Erdogan personally urged ACM Sidhu to take on a larger Pakistani workshare in KAAN’s software integration, design, and development and proposed shifting the bilateral aerospace Joint Working Group from quarterly to monthly meetings.
At the 8th Pak-Turk Industrial Expo JWG in January 2025, Defence Minister Güler said an agreement for Pakistan’s official participation was nearing finalization. Representatives from 32 Turkish and Pakistani institutions attended that meeting, hosted at Pakistan’s National Aerospace Science and Technology Park.
Yet as of May 2026, no formal contract for Pakistan’s procurement or co-production of the KAAN has been publicly announced. Turkey has signed a 20-aircraft contract with its own air force and a 48-aircraft deal with Indonesia, while TUSAŞ CEO Demiroğlu has brought the delivery timeline forward to end-2028 or early 2029.
The institutional architecture is dense – a semi-annual Industrial Expo JWG running since 2019, dedicated PAF–Turkish Air Force working groups established in July 2025, a Joint Standing Committee on security and intelligence from February 2025, and Turkish cadets now training at PAF Academy Asghar Khan – but what remains absent is the single announcement that would convert a decade of working groups, embedded engineers, and rhetorical commitment into a signed, financed, and scheduled co-production agreement for Pakistan’s first fifth-generation fighter.
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