Are you sure you responded to the correct reply? That post wasn't even in response to you.
Did you mean maybe #6881 instead
China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft - esp. Y-20/YY-20
- Thread starter Totoro
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Are you sure you responded to the correct reply? That post wasn't even in response to you.
Did you mean maybe #6881 instead
This looks fishy!!! AFAIK we haven‘t seen an operational Y-20B with IFR-pods recently and overalls the engines look psed!
The WS-20's fan diameter is slightly smaller to that of the LEAP-1C, so yeah, this is PSed.
I forgot this plane even existed. When I think about it, wouldn't the stretched Y-20 version with WS-20 engines be the perfect heavy platform as a tanker, SIGINT/ELINT, AEW&C, and transport platform with a little more capacity than the base Y-20? Yes, they are already doing this with the base Y-20 (YY-20A, KJ-3000), but the advantage here of course would be a longer range and more space.
Being that it's larger and longer, it would give it more range and space for even more internals. China doesn't have any large domestic, widebody commercial aircraft to use for military applications like the US has had for decades until the C929 comes online and is fully domesticated, and that doesn't appear to be something that will come any time soon. I think this would be the closest domestic platform they'd have to a widebody aircraft with a multitude of uses.
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The payload capacity should not be any greater unless the wings (l/d) or thrust of the WS-20s is increased.
What a stretch would allow is to carry outsized cargoes, or to increase the volume of the cargo able to be moved on one flight. Often a mission is not payload limited, but by size of the cargo hold.
Take a look at the C-141 and why they stretched it.
Has this been posted before? There are more and more sightings of the Y-20B.
The E-3, E-7, P-8, RC-135, and KC-135 are all based on narrow-body Boeing designs. Only the KC-46 is based on the widebody 767. I think the PLAAF only needs to wait for the C919 to be fully indigenized rather than the C929 to get its own fuel-efficient baseline civilian design for military applications.
Shilao and Yankee did mentioned under one of their recent podcast that the Y20F-100 will be their ideal AEW&C flying platform as the larger internal volume can accommodate more equipment and the longer fuselage can allow critical electronic components to be spaced further apart to reduce interference. But as there ae no Y20F-100 flying around at the moment, no one dares to test an immature radar on an immature platform. Thus the PLA eventually stick with the baseline Y-20 as KJ-3000's flying platform.
COMAC already got a long backlog of civilian orders for the C919 that will take them many years to fulfill. On top of that, they will probably be quite hesitated to supply airframes to the PLA even when indigenous alternatives are available for all foreign components due to the risk of arbitrary sanctions from the US. IMHO fuel efficiency isn't really a top priority for large military aircrafts and the Y20 / Y20F-100 are better suited as the platform for PLA's specialized aircrafts as they are free from the above constrains and are also larger aircrafts powered by four engines that provide a higher degree of redundancy