It is difficult to know what it means but surely it won`t satisfy too much the Russians since a contract more or less gives them some rights to sell spares to the Malaysians, these maintainance rights were put into practice with the MiG-29s sold to Peru, and it is possible the Chinese want to give a look at the Su-30MKI type fighter.

For the Indians and Russians is more or less a kind of political challenge by the Chinese since already Russia has warned China about suing Shenyang (Chinese Government) if they built additional Su-27s out of the numbers stablished and the posibility China might want to sell spare parts.

Even if the chinese do not want to sell spare parts it is more or less a tactic to analize a more advanced fighter type than their own.
However what type of advice the Chinese can offer? basicly training if they do not want to sell parts but maintainance always implies the posibility of selling spare parts and that is where the Russians and Indians might not like this possible move by the Chinese.

If the contract is anything like comerical contracts, then any use of third party parts will automatically void your warranty. They might be able to get away with it with some minor parts, but that would hardly justify the trouble. If the Malaysians are looking to the Chinese for help, then its not going to be for spares to save a few bucks, its going to be about best practice and servicing tips etc that are not printed in the manuals.

Its nothing like a political challenge because the Chinese can do whatever the hell they want with their own or anybody else’s Flankers. Once you buy something, its yours. You can mod it and remake it all you want, and so long as you don’t use the brand name to imply your moded version is a product of the original manufacture or try to market the moded version to someone else, then the orginal manufacture can do ****** all about it. The only issue that might arise is that you would void your warranty if you messed around with the product, so you can’t take it back and ask for it to be fixed if it later breaks down, and that is the issue with Malaysia using Chinese parts.

The kick in the teeth for Russia is that Malaysia would want to ask for Chinese help even with a servicing package from the Russians. That is implying that Russian servicing is just not good enough.

But then, this might not have anything to do with Russia at all, because iirc, isn’t servicing and spares support supposed to be India’s part of the joint marketing agreement between Russia and India on MKI derived planes?

Well, as Arthur has pointed out, it is very likely that the Malaysian Flankers came with a service package. One would need to see the fine print to know what is and isn’t allowed, but if it is like normal comercial contracts, then the warranty would be void if the operator did anything to the plane that was not authorised. The use of third party engineers and/or parts to service the planes is very likely to void the warranty.

Thus I do not expect any major deals, it could simply be a case of the Malaysians getting some Chinese experts in to advise them on how to do some basic servicing work that is allowed in the contract (after all, can’t have fighters being grounded because the ground crews are not allowed to tighten some loose screws, that would just be silly).

But even that would be a blow to the Russian aviation industry as it is effectively saying Russian after-sales support leaves much to be desired.

And if the Chinese can make a good enough impression with the servicing they provide, then that is going to be a factor that will be counted as a positive for choosing Chinese planes next time there is a big order due.

Senior israeli arms rep at a trade show:
“we sell to india, europe, we know our items will get IP protection, in india we have many license production deal [sic]”
“with china, what we give comes tomorrow as theirs and it spoils our reputation”. Looks like they discovered the fampus J-11 “process” as well. :rolleyes:

I’m sure that will come as a great comfort to the families of the dead soilders who would still be alive if their swanky foreign equipment didn’t stop working because of a lack of spare parts or because their weapons had been compramised to the enemy. :rolleyes:

Israel’s dealings with China is less to do with money and more to do with geopolitics.

On the one hand, Israel is trying to get cosy with the up and rising new major power, and its help to the PRC is more like an investment for the future, when they can say, ‘well look at all the help we gave you when you were being shunged by the rest of the world, now help us out with…’ Even now, China is keeping its head down wrt Israel at the UN.

On the other hand, China can give Israel all sorts of headaches if Israel tried to sell weapons to Taiwan. At the UN, or just through weapons transfers to arab states. And if some of the rumours spreading around are to believed, China made promises to Israel not to export certain weapons to the ME.

Given a choice between China and Taiwan, its really a no-brainer to side with China.

That does not surprise me at all. If Russian provided what China asked for at that time, today we would be seeing photos of WJ-11GZ version with unauthorized clones of every single avionics box Russian would have provided.

The only thing the J11B took from the Su27 is the airframe, IRST and maybe a few other minor systems that has little effect on the performance of the jet, and so was not worth replacing. Pretty much every major system has been replaced with better Chinese gear that is nothing like what the Russians sold with the SK and MKK.

Face it, Chinese companies are absolutely terrible partner to work with, their legal conscience is close to zero and licensing or ownership rights don’t tell them anything. I have to repeat myself, I am not surprised at all that every one thinks twice before selling anything really advanced to China.

Copyright infringement might be rife in China, but that is done almost exclusively by small and dodge firms. The big Chinese firms follow the rules and do things like everyone else.

What big Chinese firms do that really scare foreign companies is their ability to absorb and digest new tech and make new products based on it in a very short time frame that is of similar quality to what the western firms offer (because many of them source from these very Chinese companies) but a lot cheaper. But then every big company does similar things. Just look at how Samsung ripped off the ipod’s wheel controls for some of their phones and MP3 players, or how most cars have effectively the same safetly measures built in, or how all mobile phones have very similar feactures to each other and so on. The only difference is that western firms have the technological base that they usually only need to rip off ideas and not the tech, which they can develop easily enough themselves. So what is the fundermental difference from ripping off an idea and ripping off a technique?

Unless the SLAF are willing to spend some serious money, then they are not likely to be able to effectively stop these attacks. The planes the tigers use are small and slow, while the fighters the SLAF uses tend not to have very decent radars, so it would be very hard for them to find their targets.

Ground based SAMs and radars would suffer from terrain interferances and their effectiveness would be reduced if the tigers flew low. What more, these SAMs are likely to become targets for tiger ground forces.

The best solution would be some cheap AWACS to be able to reliably find and track the tiger planes as they take off and to vector in fighters who should have no problem taking their targets out once they are located. But that is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

If anything, I think the SLAF has the wrong approach to equiping itself. Instead of lots of low end fast jet fighters like the F7 and Kfir, they should have bought some attack helos and CAS mud movers like the Su25 or A10. These planes would have been far more effect for the threat they were facing, and with money they saved, they can maybe look into buying a small number of more advanced fighters with decent radars and/or a few bottom of the range AWACS planes to vector the planes to intercept anything the tigers send up.

It has never been mentioned that they offer water down when Su-30MKI was not ready untill 2004. and China paid $2.5B for 200 Flankers vs $3.3B for 140 for India. and Ruble was more valuable before 1998 crises than after. China got alot cheaper deal.

The SK was showing its age even in 1998, and Russia even then had better avionics and missiles that the PLAAF wanted but the Russians wouldn’t provide. From the start it was clear that there was a ‘cap’ on the tech level of gear Russia was willing to export to China, and it was lower then for India and that is what irked the Chinese. As for for the cheaper contract, well that was less of a case of the Russians giving China a price cut then of the Russians making as much profit as they can from the Indians.

Capable, reliable? that must be a Joke. Cheaper i can understand. as Wage has been risen tremendously in Russia. Su-35 with $70M price tag will still win a export competition vs $35M J-11B.

:rolleyes: Please try to read what has been written and understand it before hitting the reply button and posting a rank on something you imagined. Nowhere in that paragraph did I meantion or even allude to international export competition, but was talking about the supplying of the PLAAF. Chinese kit are now more advanced then anything the Russians have offered China so far. The Russians might have better gear in the works, but they never offer them for sale to China despite obvious interest from the PLA.

I havent seen they are concerned by anthing Chinese atall. They are more than willing to supply engines, parts to any single engine fighter made in China.

So what you call this law suit claim then? Because you are in lala land if you think there is any chance at all the Russians would get anywhere with such a suit. As for the JF17/FC1, well that is not a product that would compete directly with any Russian aircraft, so of course they are cool about making a decent profit selling engines for it.

First China should try to sell those L-15/K-8/FC-1 with its own engines and FBW.

Care to furbish us with evidence that the FBW in the FC1 is not Chinese? :rolleyes: