Defence Turkey: Mr. Murat Ceran, first of all I would like to thank you for your time. Could you please inform us on the structure of your group, your staff and fields of study as the Fixed-Wing Platforms Department at the Undersecretariat for Defence Industries?  

 I would like to start by expressing my gratitude for giving us this opportunity. We are managing the procurement projects under three different groups at the Fixed-Wing Platforms Department. First is the “Fighter Aircraft Programs” group pertaining to combat aircraft projects, the second group is the “Support Aircraft Programs” that encompass the transport and training aircrafts and the final category is the “Aircraft Modernization and Integration Programs” under which modernization of the aircrafts in our inventory is conducted. In our Department, we are running the management of over 20 projects with a team of approximately 30 staff. The projects where Turkish industry companies contribute to the off-the-shelf platforms such as JSF, A400M, Peace Eagle, and Meltem-2 exist among the programs we execute, in addition to the projects in which the indigenous Turkish defence industry products such as Indigenous Fighter Jet Program (TF-X) and New Generation Basic Trainer Aircraft (Hürkuş) exist. We acquired brand new capabilities that exist in very few countries in the world through the aircrafts we added to the inventory of the Air and Land Forces Commands particularly in the last two years. We furnished to the Turkish Armed Forces the Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) capability through 3 aircrafts we received within the scope of the Peace Eagle (PE) Project, Maritime Patrol and Surveillance capability with 6 aircrafts delivered as part of the Meltem-2 Project and last but not least the strategic air transportation capability with 2 aircrafts added to our inventory as part of the A400M Project. Moreover, as soon as the ordered 6 F-35 JSF aircrafts join our inventory, we will have the combat aircrafts that could execute the Air-Land tasks excellently.