Posted on 05/03/2021 7:02:32 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
On April 26, Xinhua, the mouthpiece of the communist regime, published an article to commemorate a Chinese carrier-based J-15 fighter jet pilot, who died in an accident as a result of his jet’s electronic control system malfunctioning during a landing; the article inadvertently revealed the weakness of the carrier’s combat capabilities.
There have always been doubts about the true capability of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aircraft carriers and their carrier-based J-15 pilot training. This unprecedented report appears more of an attempt to restore public confidence, as the CCP’s media rarely publicizes such accidents involving the military.
In fact, the Xinhua article revealed the story about Zhang Chao, a former naval first-class fighter jet pilot who was killed in a carrier landing practice five years ago, while at the same time, it claimed that the carrier-based fighter jet J-15 “achieved the technical breakthrough in night takeoff and landing,” in an apparent attempt to prove that the country’s carriers have acquired nighttime combat capability.
On April 23, Xi Jinping made a special trip to attend a commissioning ceremony of three new warships at a naval base in Sanya, southern China’s Hainan province. While the Liaoning Carrier is probably on her way back to its base Qingdao, the other one—the Shandong Carrier—is probably still in Sanya. Obviously, Xi did not take the opportunity to pay a visit to that carrier. Although the CCP media has claimed that its two aircraft carriers are a symbol of national power, their actual combat capability has never been tested in a marine conflict and is questionable. Xi Jinping should be aware of that, or maybe he doesn’t want to be involved, but the party media is still making a big deal out of it.
(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...
WHAT HAPPENED?
J-15 pilot Zhang Chao was practicing a simulated landing, his jet’s control system suddenly malfunctioned on touchdown, causing the jet to pitch up quickly. 4.4 seconds later, Zhang ejected from the cockpit at an altitude that was not high enough above the ground for his parachute to function, and Zhang fell [to his death].”
The Chinese regime had no carrier-based fighter jets. Initially, it wanted to buy them from Russia but was not able to negotiate an acceptable price. It later got a Su-33 prototype, T-10K-7, from Ukraine, so it decided to make its own carrier-based fighter jet J-15 by imitating the Su-33 prototype. However, T-10K-7 has its inherent major flaws for a carrier-based jet, making it difficult for the J-15 to pass critical tests.
After Zhang’s death, he was praised as a national “martyr,” but actually he was a victim of the Chinese regime’s attempt to copy technology it had stolen.
No zero-zero?
Well, I guess they would have had to buy those, too.
They’ll make an effort to steal the technology now.
I’m surprised they hadn’t already done so.
Loose Lips Sinks Ships
getting them in the air is easy, landing is easy but messier if yer a foo
China is corrupt...we are heading that way if we don’t address the stolen election and the rot within. Time to get back to basics. Accountability is the key to greatness.
So this death occurred five years ago, and we think by now the Chinese haven’t corrected the problem?
Thing is, they already *have* zero-zero ejector seats in the K-38 family they bought with their SU-27s and their copies thereof. They also have a line based on Martin Baker Mk7 ejector seats, modeled on examples brought down during the Vietnam War, called the TY-5. What’s going on is typical Chinese national pride - they removed the Russian and copies of Russian ejector seats plus the TY-5s in favor of their indigenously developed TY-7 series of ejector seats.
http://en.people.cn/200411/03/eng20041103_162600.html
https://www.key.aero/article/punching-out
Seems like they are making way too much of a landing accident.
They will fix the problems and move on.
They look to be a formidable ally or a deadly foe
Bad news for the pilot - yikes
It’s also not a carrier problem but an aircraft ejector seat problem. Plenty of our guys have had problems with carrier landings and had to eject too. In this case, the Chinese ejector seat didn’t work as claimed.
Or corruption-- why copy a design known to work when you can skim millions from the procurement system for a totally new dsign?
Even the snowbirds have zero zero, and they’re real old.
Some time in the last year or so, I saw a video of them doing a dog-and-pony show with their carrier operations, and they were using nylon straps like the ones used for luggage racks on cars to secure the planes to the pad eyes on the deck.
Unbelievable. Not chains. Nylon straps. Now, I could be wrong, but I don’t think those straps have what it takes over time to secure a plane in anything less than a calm sea (which is what it was in the video)
I don’t get on their case for crashing a plane...carrier operations are more difficult than people in general think they are. We crash planes too.
There is something completely off about their military operations I have seen that makes me want to discount them, but I don’t...simply because of the technology and industry they have stolen from us, and the money they have to throw at their military. Money and quantity have a quality all of their own, and we have handed that to them.
But I do believe there is something fundamentally unsound about Communist China, and it is a cultural thing. They build things that are simply bad, and there appears to be a lack of individual desire to maintain anything collectively as would be done in a military unit.
I saw a video about a British guy who lived in Communist China for something like five years teaching English, and he traveled all over the country and said it was lacking everywhere he went, that collective responsibility for maintaining things.
He said he lived in an apartment building that was a reasonably nice building by Chinese construction standards, and looked from the outside like something you might see in New Orleans, white stucco with wrought iron railing areas outside each apartment that you might be able to step out on with three people, about that size.
He said the stucco was all cracked and broken, and there were long streaks of brown rust running down from each wrought iron balcony. And not a single person would even think of maintaining it, scraping the rust and painting the wrought iron, or patching the cracked stucco and whitewashing it.
Inside, they had an elevator with one light in it. The light never worked, ever. So whenever he got on, it was pitch black up to his floor. It was apparently something wrong with the fixture not the bulb, so he tried to collect some money from his fellow renters to buy a new light fixture for the light-less elevator.
Not a single person-nobody-offered to help pay for it. Not one. And he said this attitude was EVERYWHERE in Communist China.
Now, I don’t know. I have never been there. But this guy had, and the way he described it had the ring of truth to me. The concept of mowing a lawn? Not even that.
So when I see their military, I think they may have some equipment that is good for them and dangerous to us, and a lot of it, but...that attitude they have culturally I think works against them.
I am not discounting them. But they aren’t supermen either, I don’t think.
Yeah, the J-15 is an interesting bird over and above the capabilities of the jet. China is well aware of their reputation (and realities) of only being able to copy/steal other people’s stuff, so they’ve decided to move away from copying (licensed or otherwise) and start working up their own R&D efforts - not incidentally reducing their reliance on Russia, who they may be at war with again soon. The J-15 is based on the Su-33 airframe, but under the skin, they’re using as much indigenous Chinese technology as they can. It’s a follow-on to the J-11B program, which was based on an Su-27.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-11#J-11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-15
There’s that too, but the overall Chinese direction is to go with indigenous designs rather than copy. At least with their 4th gen fighters at current.
“Unbelievable. Not chains. Nylon straps. Now, I could be wrong, but I don’t think those straps have what it takes over time to secure a plane in anything less than a calm sea (which is what it was in the video)”
Just FYI, materials science has advanced to the point that synthetic textile straps can exceed chain strength, to the point where even in civilian life in the US, tow “chains” have been replaced with tow straps. The only thing a strap doesn’t do better is spool on a winch, but there are now synthetic ‘ropes’ used to replace steel chain and steel cable in many winch applications.
The US military has slowly started to replace chains with straps where applicable - the in-plane cargo tie down chains have been replaced in part by the CGU-1/B strap system, for example: https://www.skygeek.com/military-specification-cgu-1-b-tie-down-cargo-aircraft.html
https://www.wbparts.com/rfq/1670-00-725-1437.html
https://www.army.mil/article/96140/helicopter_loading_system_lightens_burden_on_soldiers
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