On top of that, putting J-20 into service will show them the rigors of maintaining lo-RCS. They can learn from this on what’s needed to keep J-20 stealthy over the lifetime of service. They can discover all the flaws that it might have especially in terms of signature profile and look into making some minor tweaks to reduce those flaws or at least develop tactics or operational strategies that hide those flaws.

As they continue to manufacture J-20s, they will get better at consistently building high quality finishes. It’s great for any future aircraft project.

China has limited number of larger platforms, so is restricted on what they can build at the moment. A lot of these issues will probably go away by the end of this decade. But seems like H-6K does have some life even if it is such a legacy design. None of the fighter bombers can really replace the range of H-6K with real payload. Even when a new bomber design becomes available, China would still need a cheap bomb truck like H6-K.

Is the 624mm ZHUK-ME associated with MIG-29K? as Zhuk-ME is general upgrade radar for MIG-29s. and we don’t even know from what year that brochure created. You brought up J-10b and try to make it easy naval conversion. J-10B is not even proper strike fighter for land based operations let alone Naval.

I never said it was an easy conversion. SAC and CAC both pitched their designs and CAC was based off J-10. Even Richard Fisher talked about naval J-10 proposal in his article. My point all along was that PLA held flankers range/payload in high regard. It valued those as the most important factors in having a multi-role fighter jet. Which is why they’ve put this huge investment into J-15 and J-15S. J-15S will basically be like a navalized Su-30.

It still have plenty of payload left strike operations. remember it has 5 wet points. current Su-33 and its copies cant match it.

you put the same payload on su-33 and mig-29K, su-33 will have better flighter performance and range. If your goal to match su-33 range is through CFT, that can easily be done through aerial refueling. the standard PLA configuration for flankers is 4 MRAAMs + 2 SRAAM in A2A missions and 2 or 4 AShM + 2 SRAAM in anti-ship missions. They have never shown the desire to go beyond that, because that extra payload will just decrease flight performance and range. Your obsessiveness over the one extra wet point doesn’t change the fact that you get more payload/range with flankers, in addition to a heavy fighter jet that’s better for air superiority. I mean Mig-29 series is so great in multirole that RuAF must be buying them instead of the overweight and overpriced Su-30/34/35s right?

China also has 10 times more population with a lot worse health care and most competent want to flee to West to work in social media and
E- commerce firms. China simply don’t have that hard core engg. skills of Japan..

Japanese private sector very profitable. and they own factories around the world. they are not limited to domestic labor. Don’t worry China is going same path very fast without real profits and engineering skills.

Every country has problems that they deal with. None of the problems that China has changes the fact that it already has twice the economy of Japan and more than half that of US in nominal GDP. The fact that you are completely ignorant of this before I mentioned it shows that you started making this point on false assumptions and is just trying to talk your way out of it. China spends less than 2% of its GDP on defense. Even if it grows at 2% (let’s say they have lost decades like Japan has had) for the next 3 decades, they will still have the second largest economy in the world. There is no reason that China cannot afford 3 carriers. If they grow at 5%, which is still lower than what most poeople predicts, it will eventually overtake US as the largest economy in the world.

you have a lot of clues.

you can go to my blog and read about it.

so you have measured the nose of MIG-29K that proclaiming its 700mm?. only thing official is its radar range is twice of previous version with Zhuk-ME. I don’t think you even understand things like power supply and cooling space. and weight penalty of AESA radar which MIG-29K with superior engines can handle better.
Compare the MIG-29K length and depth of nose cone with J-10B.

Are there any carrier trials done with J-10?. how you come to conclusion it cannot even handle Su-33K load which is basic airdefense fighter. There is no evidence that Su-33K is certified with 4 antiship missiles or 5 wet stations. CFT and J-10 has zero chance. it always carry small fuel tanks.

MIG-29K with 3ET has range of 3200km. which is more than SU-30MK. Su-33 is even heavier than Su-30. J-15S? where are the carrier trials.

zhuk-ME’s diameter is 624 mm, how much larger is Zhuk-AE going to get vs that. I’m not sure why you are turning this into Mig-29 vs J-10B, since the discussion was on why flankers is a better option than Mig-29 for naval aviation. There is a PLAAF thread in this forum. If you want to discuss Mig-29K vs j-10, please start writing your problem with J-10 there and we can talk about it.

If you take off with external fuel tank, you are just going to have less room for other payload and have lower flight performance. More payload also naturally reduces the range of the aircraft. The fact is Su-33/J-15 will always have more range/payload than Mig-29K. No amount of J-10 bashing could change that.

the point is china simply don’t have the money due bad investments and demographic situation to built carriers in reasonable time. for same reason China cant afford Tu-160 equal and neither it can create Mi-26 equal.
Japan also had 2% growth, 2nd largest economy, but still it implode barely affording 2 JSF per year and Japan had much higher savings, better health care, less pollution and people not fleeing country. and Japanese companies overseas investments and factories are much more profitable.

No, China has the second largest economy by nominal GDP. check up on your facts. Here is GDP for you as of 2013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29
Notice something, China has almost twice the conomy of Japan and JPY has only gone down further.

If you want to really talk about financial side of things. Japan has by far the largest public debt in the developed world (over 200% of GDP and growing). It has the oldest population. It has no natural resource to work with. It has a shrinking population. Its economy hasn’t grown in 3 decades, because it’s entire policy of 0% interest rate and printing money has done nothing but add to debt. The retirement funds in Japan is going to have to start liquidating their JGB positions more and more in the next 20 years since all the retired people need to pull their money out. Either the interest rate will climb, which will be disastrous for Japanese national debt or Japanese central bank will have to print money at even higher rate. Abenomics has already caused JPY to fall from 80 yen/dollar to 120 yen/dollar and Japan is still not achieving a trade surplus. Let’s look at the latest affect of Abenomics.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/japan-third-quarter-gdp-revised-000221219.html?l=1
So yes, I agree Japan can’t afford the navy it has right now, because it’s been wasting its money on public projects that go no where and it can’t afford to service its public debt anymore.

Keeping hoping for a Chinese crash because that’s all you got. Even Greece GDP hasn’t dropped 50% from their economic troubles. How much do you think Chinese economy has to collapse by to get to your dream scenario of China not being able to afford 3 carriers.

US approach is based on allies providing bases to support deployments. China can achieve some but most will be unstable third world.

You clearly have no clue what I’m referring to. Your entire argument so far is destructive rather than trying to understand the goal of Chinese naval aviation program.

over long run. it is aging population and non scientific base.

that evaluation is 1980s. Greater payload you only need for real bombers like US is using B-1/B-2/B-52. J-10 has no chance of becoming Naval jet. its designed is too compromised. the only logical choice is buying MI-29K which has strike loads . Su-33 is already overweight. the level of weight reduction and engine power needed to make it multirole will make it very expensive.

the problem is CATOBAR and China are decades away. so there is no point in putting 4th generation fighter. MIG-29K is already certified since 2009 on Adm K. China could have bought it off the shelf and do faster training and induction with full multirole capability. It is wasting years of time with no result. remember China demographic collapse is worse than Japan. and at most 10 years maximum so there is not much chance of spending money on most probably single CATOBAR training ship.

CAC obviously thought differently about J-10 becoming naval jet and there were definitely such proposal. As for Su-33 being overweight, that’s really dependent on the mission profile. There is a lot you can do with that. You can go standard A2A configuration which should have good flight performance. You can have the anti-ship variant, which can carry 4 YJ-83Ks + 2 PL-8s. You can have buddy refueling variant and EW variant. There is a lot you can do with it, which PLAN intended right from the start and we’ve seen them test out such configurations off CV-16 already. CATOBAR and China are not far away, since it looks like their 2nd domestic carrier which will probably join service sometimes next decade will have it. Even in the first one, that’s probably going to be similar in looks to CV-16, more powerful engine will be available by then, which allows them to utilize more of its payload/range. These are things Mig-29K could never match.

As for downplaying China’s demographics, that maybe the case. In the long term, nobody knows what will happen to China’s economy and military budget. Considering that they have already planned for a CATOBAR ship and they have more than enough money to support a carrier fleet, you can believe what you will.

It is never capable of round the world trip like Vik and Adm K.

Yet, the living quarters are designed to so much more comfortable and suitable for long trips.

I suggest the measurement you are applying to the progress of Chinese carrier aviation are based on these very same standards. Anyway time will tell. Let me ask this question: If by 2017 the PLAN is still moving at this snail’s pace what will be your response then? Care to speculate?

Why would they need to move any faster? They have so much to learn right now. The most they can do is to hopefully operate with a larger airwing by then. CV-16 for the next 10 years operates as a training ship. Actually, that goes to their entire fleet that looks great on paper, but requires so much more work in training and tactical development.

Thats 2 years away….what do you think will change in that short a time even if they doubled the effort placed into the development of their naval aviation?. They wont be doing a lot more than what they are now in 2020 let alone 2017.

Why are you using the USN as your evaluation benchmark here?. The PLAN carrier even when fully operational would be a very different animal than a US CVN. It was never designed to generate sorties at anywhere near the rate a US carrier could. PLAN training, with fully fledged squadrons and experienced crews, will appear more sedate than its American counterpart (and they are years away from that position) simply as the ship wont deliver the sortie rates to necessitate anything more.

If they have two or, perhaps, three decks with one available to deploy, and support at-sea, year-round with an OCU and a couple of operational fastjet squadrons worked up by 2025 I’d say they are doing about as well as could be reasonably expected. Where they are now is entirely consistent with that kind of tempo.

Although I agree with what you are saying here, but USN is the template they are using for developing carrier operation (and the navy for that matter).

Btw, this interview by Admiral Greenert is quite interesting. I think it’s pretty clear what China’s intentions are.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=122760

Greenert said he was the first U.S. service member to be allowed aboard China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, something he wasn’t sure would happen on this trip. He also met with some of the carrier’s crew.

The Liaoning is a refitted Russian aircraft carrier.

“We went, not stem-to-stern, but throughout a lot of it,” Greenert said. “Then we went to a submarine. Then we went to a destroyer — about a 2,000-ton … almost the length of a football field — and then on one of their patrol craft.”

The Chinese aircraft carrier is “very Russian,” Greenert said.

“That means it’s big, it’s heavy and it’s onerous,” he explained.

But, the admiral said, the Chinese have completely upgraded their carrier. They stripped out all the old Russian-style equipment “and everything they put in is very modern and Chinese.”

The carrier is still being worked on at a shipyard in Dalian, in northeast China, he said.

China will build another carrier like the Liaoning relatively soon, Greenert said.

“It’ll look just like this one, they said — ski ramp, about the same tonnage, 65,000-70,000 tons. … They’re moving on a pace that is extraordinary,” the admiral said.

Greenert said Wu told him the ship is the basis for research and development of what will be a blue-water, aircraft-carrier-focused navy.

“I think that he may be wanting to do this on his watch,” he said. “He’s got about four-and-a-half more years to … have this carrier out to sea like we do, with a series of destroyers around it and the ability to launch and recover aircraft in the tens and maybe twenties. But I’m not overly concerned right now, they have a lot of work to do.”

how is your prediction of Brazil as superpower coming along?

over the long run, I’m quite bullish on Brazil’s economic prospects too

You have indication of China future carriers earlier than RuaN and carrier based aircraft more advanced?. J-20 on carrier has no future. there is no mastery of TVC tech by China. same old canards from 1980s.

how is J-15 superior to MIG-29K?. MIG-29K can launch 4 300KM antiship missile. so it always have first shot on carriers in open seas. Su-33K likely have bigger RCS and likely overweight due to canards.

Those are back in the days. nothing to do with tomorrow.

economis of scale? have you looked at AL-31 production with RD-33. It is exceeding by 10 to 1. if Su-33 some version of was suitable they would have chosen it.
All are baseless speculations. Chinese built flankers haven’t shown that heavy pods like on Su-34.

China made the evaluation in late 80s that they preferred Su-27 over Mig-29 due to its greater payload and range. When they were choosing between Su-27 and j-10 for building naval fighter jet, they picked Su-27 again for similar reasons.

We are still in the beginning stage of China figuring out the basics of carrier operation. But carrying 4 YJ-83 AShM for J-15 shouldn’t be a problem at all. We have pictures from 2013 showing J-15s carrying 2 YJ-83s and 2 PL-8s. We’ve seen J-15 carrying buddying refueling pod. Remember, they are still at very stages of practicing taking off and landing with payload. And we’ve seen possible designs from growler version from J-15. I’m too lazy to post all the photos, but huitong’s site have some of them. You can check it up.
http://chinese-military-aviation.blogspot.com/p/fighters-ii.html#J-15

As they spend more time training, they become more comfortable taking off and landing with greater payload. I’m not sure which pods on Su-34 you are referring to, but I can’t think of any pods for naval aviation missions that China hasn’t developed something similar to already.

In terms of air superiority, it’s pretty clear by now that flanker series has advantage given similar generation of electronics and missiles in BVR. Most countries are buying flankers rather than fulcrums for that reason. In terms of multirole capability, something with greater payload and range will generally be better for that purpose.

If you want to argue that Mig-29K is a better fit for Adm K class carrier, because you can have a larger airwing of it than Su-33, that’s legitimate argument. I don’t have the numbers, but it’s certainly possible that Mig-29K can take off with similar fuel/payload to Su-33 off the ski-jump. But if China is looking to develop a CATOBAR carrier to fully utilize flanker’s payload, I don’t see how Mig-29K can match that.

If you have the photos, can you post them here? I am curious how the Liaoning looks (and looked) from the inside.

I think a good number of photos from this google search i did are from CV-16. Sorry too many photos to post
https://www.google.com/search?q=cv-16+interior+photos&biw=1280&bih=673&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=D06xVIT4AcLsgwSbpoLwBw&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ#tbm=isch&tbs=rimg%3ACURvjHm2ZX2KIjh7fXRJ8NOhX7i2Z-yAyoC_1ljV31hITGAarmnL2WFdtWDCg21-Q12Zto6cvDfi55O4LXiQp2EbSCCoSCXt9dEnw06FfEZvFRPNSOREVKhIJuLZn7IDKgL8R2c8ZWRE5xx4qEgmWNXfWEhMYBhF7EP31BpLFnioSCauacvZYV21YERpIZN7i80xmKhIJMKDbX5DXZm0RMf8JJmm7OPEqEgmjpy8N-Lnk7hH_1UM7dQjcoFioSCQteJCnYRtIIETH_1CSZpuzjx&q=dalian%20carrier%20interior%20photos&imgdii=_

The comment comparing PLAN carrier development with Russian carrier development is presented in the context of after several decades of developing aircraft carrying warships starting with the Moskova (1967) to the present day Kuznetsov, the Russians have still been unable to field a competent carrier force complete with all the bells and whistles expected of a carrier force.

I argue here that several decades into the future the PLAN carrier force will be no further developed relative to western carriers than the Russian carriers are today to western carrier development.

When things started I had great expectations for Chinese carrier development due to their attempt to copy US Navy procedures, their shore based carrier simulator and the example of what NOT to do as presented by the Russian navy.

Yet today we see the PLAN has stagnated in developing a complete carrier system. Creating a carrier force capable of up-tempo operations consists not of just hardware but human software as well, and China has not demonstrated to my eye the ability to be loose enough to move aircraft and crewmen in sync together on the deck. This could be attributed to the rigidity of Chinese society or something else. But I believe that the PLAN is not capable of performing what is known as “the dance on the deck” which is vital if you are going to have a man-machine interface which imposes order on the chaos of flight operations.

I have said it before and I say it now: The Chinese lack the coolness factor, the secret sauce if you will that is necessary for carrier operations.

Just look at any of the videos of aircraft and crew interacting on the deck of a carrier during flight operations and you will see the definition of cool. China does not have a tradition of cool. And they will need that if they want to be a player in the carrier game. The hand signs, the body movements of men working in close proximity to dangerous machines all scream cool.

Some say that the Chinese have adopted a Cargo Cult approach to developing carrier procedures. That may if fact be true

To be accurate the Chinese have had a long history with aircraft carriers:

“…Since 1985, China has acquired four retired aircraft carriers for study, the Australian HMAS Melbourne and the ex-Soviet carriers Minsk, Kiev and Varyag.”

China has proceeded at its own rate of speed which is true, but to say that China has little experience with aircraft carriers is false. Counting 2015 China has nearly 20 years experience with aircraft carriers.

Have you taken a look at the interior work they did to CV-16 to get it into service? No wonder it took them 10 years to get it back into service. There is a carrier thread on SDF. I suggest you go and look at some of those photos.

They haven’t had 20 years experience with carriers. They’ve had 2 years of operation. Right now, CV-16 is basically still going through sea trial tests. A lot of stuff for PLAN to learn and nobody to teach them. All evidences show that they are trying to go in the USN carrier direction even if it will take them a long time to get to a competent level.