TUSAS Engine Industries (TEI)

TUSAS Engine Industries was set up in Eskisehir in 1985 as a joint venture between what is now Turkish Aerospace and GE Aerospace, with the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation and the Turkish Aeronautical Association holding the remaining slice. For its first two decades the work was parts and module manufacturing for other people's engines. That business is still large and still pays the bills. TEI machines, coats and assembles components for the CFM56, LEAP, GEnx, GE90 and GE9X programmes, exporting around 400 million dollars of them in 2024, and that revenue underwrites everything the company has since taught itself to design. GE Aerospace holds a large minority stake, and that relationship is what opened the international parts work in the first place.

Engine design and product development is the newest of the three activity areas and the one that changed what TEI is. Thirteen indigenous engines came out of the last decade. The TEI-PD170 turbodiesel powers the Anka and Aksungur unmanned aircraft and reaches a ceiling near 45,000 feet, the TEI-TS1400 turboshaft flies on the T625 Gokbey helicopter and produces up to 1,660 shaft horsepower, and the TEI-TJ90 and TEI-TJ300 turbojets serve high speed target drones and anti ship missiles respectively. Lighter piston work includes the TEI-PG50 two stroke for unmanned aircraft under 300 kilograms and the PD180ST and PD222ST turbodiesels. The TEI-TF6000 was the first Turkish military turbofan to run, aimed at unmanned combat aircraft, and the TEI-TF10000 scales that core up with an afterburner. Above both sits the TEI-TF35000, the engine intended for the Kaan fighter.

Engine assembly, inspection and test work together with maintenance, repair and overhaul make up the third area. TEI assembles and tests F110 engines under licence for Turkish F-16s and the T700-TEI-701D for T70 helicopters, and it overhauls TF33 and Makila 1A1 engines for military operators. Design engineering support on the TP400-D6 and calibration services are sold as separate lines of work. Test cells, materials laboratories and calibration facilities at the Eskisehir site support all three activity areas, which is what lets an indigenous design move from rig running to flight qualification without leaving the country. Headcount went from about 1,200 in 2014 to roughly 4,000 in 2025, and the mix flipped over the same period from seventy percent blue collar to a majority of white collar engineers. That shift is the clearest single measure of what the company turned into, and it is why an outfit that once cut turbine blades to someone else's drawing is now the named engine supplier on Turkey's fighter, helicopter and unmanned aircraft programmes. None of this arrived quickly. The TS1400 took the better part of a decade from first core running to the edge of serial production, and the TF10000 was still working toward its first afterburner ignition test in 2027, which is a useful corrective to any assumption that aero engine development can be compressed the way airframe work sometimes can.