Turkey’s first passenger jet project is experiencing turbulence. The TRJet program is expected to produce the country’s first regional passenger jet by 2019, but there is a problem. According to Hurriyet newspaper’s Washington correspondent Tolga Tanis, the Turkish Undersecretariat for Defense Industries has informed TRJet’s lead manufacturer, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), that at least 70% of the new aircraft must be produced in Turkey. Based in the United States and owned by the Turkish American husband-wife couple Fatih and Eren Ozmen, SNC argues that a 70% target before 2023 is unrealistic.

Additional reports in the Turkish press and by experts who spoke to Al-Monitor point to bigger problems that could keep the billion dollar TRJet project grounded come 2019. On the one hand, demand from domestic and international airline companies may be insufficient. Furthermore, although Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu hope the experience and know-how from the prestige project would help to expand Turkey’s still-infant defense and aerospace industries, whether the country’s state-owned Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) will be involved in TRJet is still unclear.

To appreciate the emotional weight of a domestically produced airplane for Turkey, a short history lesson is in order. In the 1930s, the country’s leading entrepreneur Nuri Demirag worked on civilian airplane prototypes with a view for mass production and export. But World War II, a freak accident and a destructive legal dispute with the Turkish Air League, which had pledged to purchase planes from Demirag, killed off the enterprise by the mid-1940s. Many Turks mistakenly came to believe that their country’s burgeoning alliance with the United States destroyed their infant aircraft industry.

Turkey continued to grapple with producing its own aircraft during the Cold War. In the wake of the Cyprus war of 1974 and the US arms embargo that lasted until 1978, the country embarked on a “produce your own plane, your own ship, your own tank” campaign. Though full self-sufficiency in aircraft production did not go far, in an ironic twist, TAI began to manufacture F-16 fighter jets with a US license in the 1980s.