{"id":181093,"date":"2016-10-02T17:32:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-02T22:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/10\/02\/china-working-on-a-conventional-aircraft-carrier\/"},"modified":"2016-10-02T17:32:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-02T22:32:00","slug":"china-working-on-a-conventional-aircraft-carrier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/10\/02\/china-working-on-a-conventional-aircraft-carrier\/","title":{"rendered":"China Working on a Conventional Aircraft Carrier"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 360px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/afS4g0s.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" bordercolor=\"white\" src=\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/afS4g0s.jpg\" width=\"350\" \/><\/a><br \/><i>Note the towbar on the front gear<\/i><\/div>\n<p>They are already in the process of <a href=\"https:\/\/news.usni.org\/2016\/09\/22\/china-experimenting-catapult-launched-carrier-aircraft\">developing a CATOBAR variant of the Flanker<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">China has stepped up development of Catapult-Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) operations for its carriers, with the appearance of a Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark carrier-borne fighter with CATOBAR apparatus and continued construction of supporting land-based infrastructure.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">In mid-September photos surfaced online of a J-15 with what appears to be a catapult launch bar on its nose wheel. These are used to couple the aircraft to the catapult of the carrier during the launch sequence, and would be the latest indication that China\u2019s rumored third aircraft carrier will utilize the CATOBAR system of aircraft launch and recovery.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">It is not clear whether this aircraft is a new-build prototype for the CATOBAR J-15, or one of the six original J-15 prototypes modified with a new nose wheel. Also noteworthy is that this J-15 is powered by the indigenous Shenyang-Liming WS-10 Taihang turbofan. Although already in widespread use with China\u2019s land-based J-11 fighters, the Chinese engine has never gone to sea during trials and operations on China\u2019s current sole aircraft carrier, Liaoning.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is not a surprise.<\/p>\n<p>While getting the operations right (an aircraft carrier deck is a dangerous place) is a non trivial matter, the basic technology of steam catapult launches is over 60 years old.<\/p>\n<p>As an aside, the Chinese are proceeding on this incrementally, so I would rather expect that their 1<sup>st<\/sup> carrier with a catapult to be in the size range somewhere between the Clemenceau (25,000 T) and the Charles de Gaulle (48,000 T) size, much smaller than a typical supercarrier (~100,000 T).<\/p>\n<p>I would expect China to field a CATOBAR carrier as a part of a full carrier group in the next 7-12 ears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note the towbar on the front gear They are already in the process of developing a CATOBAR variant of the Flanker: China has stepped up development of Catapult-Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) operations for its carriers, with the appearance of a Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark carrier-borne fighter with CATOBAR apparatus and continued construction of &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[772,871,820,903],"class_list":["post-181093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-aviation","tag-china","tag-military","tag-naval"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}