This is a recent story from Kanwa about western equipment in the Chinese assembly lines that produce liscense-built Su27SK’s. It comes after earlier reports that J-11’s were returned because of unacceptable quality in their construction.
Following the broad trend of Chinese industrial modernization in the civilian sector where Western precision machinery are increasing incorporated, it’s only a matter of time that they would show up in military factories.
It would be interesting to compare the finish of the J-10 or JH7A
against ealier models like the J-8II where you can see rivets along the length and breadth of an all-metal plane. There’ll almost certainly be a greater use of composites and molded or conformally designed parts in the coming years.
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(Kanwa News June 10, 2002) China’s CCTV recently disclosed the pictures of the SU27SK fighters on the assembly line of Shenyang Aircraft Company, which was the first time for the Chinese official media to publicly acknowledge that China is assembling SU27SK.
Russian aviation experts who are currently assisting China in the assembly of SU27SK fighters told Kanwa’s correspondent at an exclusive interview that the testing equipments on the production lines of Shengyang Aircraft Company are much more westernized than that of Russia. Kanwa also discovered that in the above companies, more western NC facilities have been put into use.
The production technology is obviously better than the original Russia-made SU27SK. The screw binding line is almost un-recognizable… (Kanwa Digest News, for full story, see Kanwa June 10 issue>)
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June 26, 2002 at 7:10 am