US President Donald Trump's visit to Ankara for the NATO summit could help secure Turkey's acquisition of dozens of fighter jet engines, but won't resolve the F-35 dispute that has soured ties, analysts have told AFP.
The July 7-8 summit will bring together leaders from the military alliance's 32 member states.
Last month, Trump promised to make Erdogan "very happy" when asked about Turkey looking to secure F110 jet engines and being readmitted to the F-35 fighter jet programme.
"It's likely to be the green light for the F110 GE engines for the KAAN fighter plane, about 40 of them," Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul-based Edam think tank, told AFP.
"Turkey has produced a couple of prototypes which are flying with the F110 engine, but it has been waiting for the supply of additional engines to increase the number of KAAN platforms," he said.
KAAN is a twin-engine stealth fighter being developed by Turkey to replace the fleet of F-16s as Ankara seeks to join the exclusive club of nations producing fifth-generation combat aircraft.
Although Turkey will eventually fit the fighter with its own domestically-produced engine,-- the F110s lacking stealth capability -- that project is still in the preliminary design phase.
Turkey received a first batch of 10 F110s in September, and talks with the US government to acquire 80 more were "ongoing", he said.
But that's been held up by a lack of political clearance linked to Turkey's 2017 acquisition of a Russian S-400 missile defence system.
Infuriated, Washington expelled Turkey from its F-35 fighter jet programme in 2019 and imposed CAATSA sanctions a year later, hampering Turkish defence projects and souring ties. (AFP)
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