All-Chinese jets to serve on nation's first carrier

No doubt they are in for a rough ride learning carrier ops. As did we. From 1949 to the 1988 (a period of 40 years) the US Navy and US Marines lost thousands of aircraft and thousands of personnel to mishaps of all types with jets, helos, trainers, and cargo or other aircraft on carriers, or large deck amphibious assault vessels (which are essentially aircraft carriers themselves). In 1954 alone the Navy/Marine Corps accident rate was almost fifty-five major mishaps per hundred thousand flight hours, meaning that 776 aircraft and 535 aviators were lost in that year alone.

Now, th Chinese will benefit somewhat from our lessons, they will learn a few things from our own experiences and the published accounts of them. For example, they do not have to develop and angeld deck, optical landing systems, automated landing systems, color coded deck operations, etc. And they are studying everything we have written and documebnts (and we have open sourced a lot) about operations.

But their J-15 is a decent design. They have modernized the SU-33 and I believe even added an ASEA radar. They just haven't produced but six prototypes so far.

But they are producing decent J-11Bs now, and they may have solved their long standing indegenous engine problem. We shall see. They have literally hundreds and hundreds of SU-27s, SU-30s, J-11s, and now J-11Bs and train regularly wioth them because they have the finds...most of which are coming courtesy of us.

As to AWACS, they have them, purchased and them built foremr Russian designs (again) and in some numbers.

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