South Korea builds its own engine for drone combat jets

South Korea’s Hanwha Aerospace launched a joint program with the Korea AeroSpace Administration to develop a 4,500-pound-class turbofan engine for unmanned combat aircraft, targeting completion by 2029 and backed by a total investment plan of approximately $500 million across the company’s broader UAV propulsion portfolio.

The engine, designed specifically for Collaborative Combat Aircraft and other unmanned platforms, will be the first engine developed in South Korea to integrate a starter-generator directly on the engine shaft, providing up to 100 kilowatts of onboard electrical power for the sensors, radars, and electronic warfare systems that autonomous combat aircraft demand.

The Collaborative Combat Aircraft concept that sits at the center of this program represents one of the most consequential shifts in military aviation thinking in a generation. Rather than deploying manned fighters alone, the CCA model pairs human-piloted aircraft with autonomous unmanned wingmen that extend the formation’s sensor reach, absorb threat exposure that would otherwise fall on manned aircraft, and multiply the number of weapons a single flight can carry into a contested environment. The United States Air Force has been developing its own CCA program under contracts with Anduril and General Atomics, and Australia is pursuing the MQ-28 Ghost Bat in a similar role. South Korea’s decision to develop a domestic engine for this category of aircraft rather than depend on foreign propulsion reflects a determination to build sovereign capability across the full technology stack, not just the airframe.

The engine’s high-bypass turbofan design prioritizes fuel efficiency over raw thrust, a configuration that makes sense for a platform whose primary advantage is endurance and range rather than the burst performance needed for air-to-air combat at high speed. High-bypass turbofans move a large volume of air around the core rather than through it, producing thrust more efficiently at subsonic cruise speeds than low-bypass designs optimized for supersonic flight. For a CCA operating alongside a manned fighter at mission cruise speeds, that efficiency translates directly into more time on station, more range from a given fuel load, and lower operating costs over the life of a fleet that the press release envisions at significant scale.

The 100-kilowatt starter-generator integrated on the engine shaft addresses a power requirement that has become a defining constraint in unmanned combat aircraft design. Modern sensor packages, active electronically scanned array radars, electronic warfare systems, and the computing hardware that enables autonomous decision-making all consume electrical power at rates that earlier generations of unmanned aircraft were never designed to supply. The F-35 uses an integrated power package to manage its own demanding electrical loads, and the lesson from that program is that power generation cannot be an afterthought when building a platform whose combat effectiveness depends on electronics-intensive systems. Hanwha’s decision to build the generator directly into the engine shaft rather than adding a separate auxiliary power unit reduces weight, complexity, and maintenance burden while ensuring the power supply scales with engine output.

The 4,500-pound-class engine announced on May is one piece of a larger propulsion portfolio that Hanwha Aerospace is building with Korean government backing, and The Defence Blog reported in November 2025 that the parallel 5,500-pound-class low-bypass turbofan for Korea’s Low Observable Unmanned Wingman System stealth drone had entered ground testing in January 2026. That engine, developed jointly with South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development, is designed to replace the Ukrainian-made AI-222 engine produced by Ivchenko-Progress in Zaporizhzhia that has served as a stopgap solution on the LOWUS prototype during flight testing. The ground verification and performance evaluation campaign confirmed the engine’s readiness for the next phase of the stealth wingman program, and the 4,500-pound CCA engine announced this week sits alongside it in a propulsion family that now spans multiple thrust classes and platform types.

A 1,400-horsepower turboprop addresses the medium-altitude UAV segment, covering the surveillance and intelligence-gathering platforms that operate at lower speeds and altitudes than combat aircraft. Core technologies for a 10,000-pound-class turbofan aimed at stealth platforms round out a portfolio that spans essentially every tier of the unmanned aviation market from medium-altitude reconnaissance to high-end autonomous combat. The breadth of that portfolio is itself a strategic statement: South Korea is not developing a single engine for a single program but building the industrial and technological foundation to power an entire generation of unmanned military aircraft without dependence on foreign suppliers.

Hanwha Aerospace will apply additive manufacturing, the process of building components layer by layer from digital designs rather than machining them from solid metal, to shorten development cycles and reduce cost. Additive manufacturing has transformed aircraft engine development over the past decade, enabling complex internal geometries that traditional machining cannot produce, reducing part counts by consolidating components that previously required multiple pieces, and cutting the time from design change to physical test article from months to weeks. For a program targeting a 2029 completion date, the ability to iterate quickly on component designs without waiting for lengthy traditional manufacturing cycles is operationally significant.

A Hanwha Aerospace official described the commercial logic driving the investment: “As global demand for CCA and unmanned platforms grows, propulsion will be central to fielding these systems at scale. This program puts Hanwha Aerospace in a position to deliver the performance, affordability, and delivery speed that customers need.”

The dual-use nature of the high-bypass turbofan also opens a commercial avenue that purely military programs cannot access. The same engine optimized for a CCA could power small business jets and other commercial aircraft, creating a second market that helps amortize development costs across a larger production volume and reduces the per-unit price for military customers. That commercial crossover logic is well-established in the turbofan industry: the CFM56 family that powers thousands of Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s began as a military engine before becoming the most commercially successful jet engine in history. Hanwha is not claiming that scale of ambition, but the structural logic of dual-use development is the same.