"China’s Second Aircraft Carrier Sails Closer to ..." Topic

….Joining the Fleet.

"China's first homemade aircraft carrier left her home port of Dalian for her third sea trial on Oct. 28, 2018. The Type 001A flattop could commission into front-line service as early as 2019, according to the U.S. Defense Department — growing Beijing's carrier force to two and giving China the world's second-biggest flattop fleet.

The new trial will test the vessel's weapons system, control system and communications system, Wang Yunfei, a retired Chinese navy officer, told Global Times…"
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

You still need at least 3 ships to have one deployed.

And, jets with engines that can handle the landing approaches, as well as trained personnel to conduct night landings in pitch black conditions, and rough seas.

Aerial refueling will no doubt be an issue too, for them, given the small number of jets on those carries, and no tankers to speak of. Sukhois can buddy refuel, but that wipes out a lot of the small number of jets on the carriers.

Also, the lack of catapults makes taking off fully fueled and loaded with weapons an impossibility as well.

Their third carrier may fix that, if they can get it to work, but then they only will have one that will have the catapults.

Those little islands and runways on them, in the SCS look a lot more important, given the above issues, at least in the near term – next 10 – 20 years.

China is playing the long game in this as with thier overall approach to everything else.

In time they will have what they need and they are banking on having that time

Agree!.

Amicalement
Armand

Well, with their single party system, Communist China seems to have long term plans most of the time.

For the most part, their projects typically don't have to face a potential re-set button that would force them to start again from scratch like when we switch administrations every 4 to 8 years in the free West.

Dan

I see them about on the level of India, as far as carrier ops go, and perhaps with a slight lead on Japan, until they get their F-35B models.

They should've chosen a lighter plane than their navalized Flanker copy, which they reverse-engineered and by most accounts is a failure. It's just too big and heavy.

link

@28mm Fanatik: agree, they should have gone with the naval version of the Mig29 Fulcrum.

Flankers are great land-based planes, but they are the size of an F14. Makes them quite the difficult plane to land on any carrier, let alone one the size of the Liaoning (about 80% the size of a Nimitz).

Or, they could choose to not be so cheap, and just buy some "real" Flankers with decent Russian engines in them, that work as needed.

Tom Clancy said something back in the '80s that applies here. He was talking about the Soviet navy at the time, but it's the same idea.
"It'll take them decades to use aircraft carriers properly. We already know how to sink aircraft carriers. In fact, we have more experience at it than anyone else."

The Russians won't sell any more Flankers to the Chinese, not after they reverse-engineered the Flanker to make the J11 (land-based) and J15 (carrier-based).

Actually Russia will still sell Flankers to China even knowing that China will reverse-engineer them because it is cash-strapped. It most recently sold 24 of its newest variant, the SU-35 Flanker-E with thrust-vectoring engines, to Beijing for $2.5 USD billion, long after China's illegal copying of earlier Flankers she acquired into the J-11 and J-15.

I'd missed that sale! Crud, that's 100mil a plane, too…

Russia is right to charge that much considering China's record of unauthorized "technology transfers" with their arms exports.