Old designs take a long time to die in China, Hyperwarp 😀

They’ll keep the lines going as long as possible but the H-6 variants are still viable in a long range saturation role.

Is it this….?

It could be. It’s called a gunship in the People’s Daily article thought the pict from Huitong’s site is listed as possibly being a scout machine.

http://english.people.com.cn/200412/28/eng20041228_168902.html

New gunship successful in first flight in E. China province

The armed-type Zhi-11, a new type of China-made gunship, made its first flight successfully in Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province, east China, Monday, marking a latest progress for China’s efforts to upgrade its gunship products.

The first flight was conducted at the Lumeng Airport, which is located in Jingdezhen, where the Changhe Aircraft Industry Group, a major gunship manufacturer in the country, is located.

The armed-type Zhi-11 is a light-type gunship and it has been independently developed by Chinese on the basis of the Zhi-11 series of helicopter, according to company sources.

The Zhi-11 family, which passed official appraisal in December 2000 and entered into batch production since then, has been well sold at home and abroad. Early this year, the company began studying the armed type of Zhi-11 helicopter.

Wang Bin, chairman of the board and general manager, addressed the first-test-flight ceremony, pledging that his company will continue the efforts to improve the internal and outer quality of their products.

“Hundreds of planes” from the rescue effort will be arriving within 48 hours.

UN Says `Enormous’ Aid Effort Follows Deadly Quake (Update3)

Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) — The United Nations said 24 countries have joined “an enormous relief effort” following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Indonesia’s coast that killed more than 23,000 and destroyed towns from Thailand to India. Aftershocks may cause further tsunamis and flooding, officials said.

Damage from the earthquake, the world’s biggest in four decades, “will probably be many billions of dollars,” said Jan Egeland, the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs. Insurers’ losses may be less than $5 billion because so little property in the region is insured, according to Robert Hartwig, an Insurance Information Institute economist in New York.

“This is not the biggest earthquake in recorded history, but the effects may be the biggest because many more people live in exposed areas than ever before,” Egeland told reporters in New York. “Hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything and millions have only polluted water to drink, no sanitation or health services.”

Egeland said more than 2,000 UN workers and hundreds of airplanes will arrive within 48 hours in the eight nations most severely affected by the earthquake off Sumatra. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies asked for $6.6 million in emergency aid and the World Food Program appealed for $1.5 million.

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This is an unimaginable tragedy. This calamity is even reaching the Western nations because of Thailand and Sri Lanka as major tourist spots.

From just Thailand alone:

The US, at least 8 dead and several hundred missing.
Italy, at least 10 dead and over 100 missing.
Germany, at 8 dead and up to 100 missing.

This does not even include the other European countries, Australia, New Zealand and the Far East. Thailand is a major tourist area for massive numbers of people from Hong Kong, Japan and China.

The missing are many times the known dead. The total could be even grimmer over the next days. We can only hope that the missing are just in areas which lost communications but every hour that missing do not report in, the chances that they survived becomes lower.

Yes they did. They died for the freedom of everyone, the same as the Americans did.

An absolute falsehood. They Brits in no ways died for anyone other than themselves and their European kindred.

To begin with, Britain held colonial possessions during the war and killed tens of thousands afterwards to keep ahold of them.

“Freedom” to them meant simply freedom from German domination of Europe. Of people in Malaya, Kenya, India and other peoples chafing under foreign, British rule? Their freedom was not on British minds.

In fact, Churchill made sure that colonial possessions in Asia, including Indo-China which would later lead to American bloodletting, were returned to France over the objections of the people there.

The Brits had no intention of universal “freedom.” The Americans, at least, freed the Phillipines.

The JH-7 project began before the MKK was available or even conceived. So punt the MKK argument out the window.

Also, the Chinese Harpy and Phalcon problems are prime examples of how to get yourself screwed in the arse by depending on foreign equipment. An obvious reason to not rely on a foreign product – even one that is nominally superior.

If a nation has a reasponable chance at being in a war (which excludes places like Ireland or New Zealand) and unless that nation likes the idea of being hung out to dry, there really isn’t any serious argument against the home project.

Some of the obvious problems with a foreign plane are your main strikecraft are listed below:

1) Supplies of parts, upgrade and even the original order could be stopped at any time,

2) You take money away from your own industries to support a foreign one,

3) massive intelligence leaks since you can’t control the data on the systems and ordnance you’re buying from going to anyone else.

Unless, the MKK comes from country dedicated to China’s survival, you continue domestic projects in parallel like the JH-7A as insurance.

And especially, in projects like the upgraded JH-7A which already had most of its development costs and resources invested already in the original.

Now the FC-1 is an plane that needs to be built. Anyone with an understanding of the history of the PAF could see this. Pakistan wants a home industry after being embargoed repeatedly. There can’t be a more pressing reason. The FC-1 is a political necessity as well as a CAC company initiative.

Pakistan currently can’t build a plane like the J-10 so the FC-1 is designed to form the basis of a new Pakistan industry. There is no way to build a composite heavy plane with the J-10 there.

To Chengdu, it is a chance for them to produce an open-architectured and economical plane with technology learned from the J-10 program. It is obvious since the production team, the lead designer and the lead test pilot of the FC-1 came directly from the J-10 endeavor. (We first found out about the J-10B two-seater from an article on the FC-1’s lead designer. )

So both the FC-1 and JH-7A are necessary (and actually very economical because the tech for them were already vested.)

That said, there are plenty of other Chinese planes that aren’t necessary. The myriad of new J-7 and J-8II (and Q5) variants are obviously unnecessary.

Those a/c were important when they were first produced but not now. They are still being produced solely to keep large workforces employed.

The hardest thing to RE is the material science. The makeup of the alloys and composites and the processes that go into making them.

Engines are a prime example. The difference in service life of Western and Russian engines is not a few percentage points but is actually exponential. The problem is not in the design but in the Russian’s (or anyone else’s) ability to replicate the material that goes into making the engines.

Submarine propeller blades is another classic example. The Russians know the principal behind making a quiet blade but they couldn’t do it until they imported a smoothing machine made by Japan (this was one of the major coups in the Cold War.)