Turkish Aerospace (TUSAŞ) is building Turkey’s biggest and Europe’s second-largest subsonic wind tunnel facility. The facility will be primarily used to carry out wind tunnel tests of Turkish Fighter (TF-X). The wind tunnel is intended to be used to develop indigenous, rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft, especially the Turkish Fighter.

The tunnel will have three different test sections, large, small and open. The test specimens will be positioned in these sections and equipped with measurement and sensing devices for advanced testing.

With the integrated moving ground belt system, landing and take-off tests for aircraft will be carried out only in this tunnel in Turkey. In addition to these test capabilities, the production, integration and instrumentation of the models to be tested will also be carried out in this facility. Thus, significant contributions will be made to the product development process.

The test facility will be the third in Turkey on a subsonic wind tunnel. TÜBİTAK-SAGE and Middle East Technical University (METU) own two subsonic wind tunnels. SAGE’s tunnel dates back to the 1940s, but it was not used for a very long time.SAGE took over the control of Ankara Wind Tunnel (Ankara Rüzgar Tüneli/ART) and METU completed the tunnel in 2020. Therefore, having a plural facility is considered an advantage as its confirms measurements.