TAI Martı

The TAI Martı is a small radio-controlled surveillance drone designed, developed and built by Turkish Aerospace Industries in 2003. Its name is the Turkish word for seagull. The shoulder-winged aircraft has an all-composite airframe and a two-cylinder two-stroke gasoline engine of about 1.3 to 1.6 kilowatts in a tractor layout, and it weighs 12 kilograms at maximum take-off. It carries a two-axis gimbaled electro-optical and infrared camera with real-time telemetry, takes off on wheels or by catapult and recovers on wheels or by parachute. It was produced originally for pilot training and has been in service since 2003, and in 2004 it completed aerial image retrieval and shooting tests in Mersin, in work with the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, that led to replacing an older retrieval system that used balloons.