China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft

tphuang said:

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Looks like Y-5U unmanned transport had its maiden flight.

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do they change it to fly-by-wire?

High-resolution images of Namibia's Y-9E transport. Namibia is the first known export customer.

Any details of the Y-9E contract with Namibia, when signed, training of aircrew/ground crew, etc?

CMPR says there were only 16 YY-20As in March:

But going by serials from this thread the actual number is somewhere between 25-50? How is there such a high degree of uncertainty?

ismellcopium said:

CMPR says there were only 16 YY-20As in March:

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But going by serials from this thread the actual number is somewhere between 25-50? How is there such a high degree of uncertainty?

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The point is, they were initially delivered with 2024x numbers and then renumbered to 20841 to 20947 (maybe 21040 as the highest one known). This would correspond to 20 tanker.

Unfortunately several were later seen with 20541 to 20740 numbers, what fits nicely to the same overall number of 20, but some sources list them as individual aircraft, o that in summary numbers from 20541 to 21040 or 50 aircraft!

Maybe @huitong can it explain better or knows more, but per my understanding they were indeed renumbered.



PS: But also the number of Y-20 is off, since per Huitong again we know already 53.

It is also unclear what CMPR considered to be in service. Maybe it has to be delivered to unit and seen some period of operation before being considered to be in service.

For our sake, basically when we see a photo with number that's painted in PLAAF colors, we consider that to be in service.

Since we are at least 9 month from when the report came out, isn't it quite reasonable to expect a lot of deliveries in between?

I went through all available Google Earth images on Yanliang that has Y20s. and tabulate them.

The numbers are Y20 spotted on the ground, aircraft in the air are not shown.

By this tabulation, I would say there are at around 80-100 Y20 (all variants) rolled out for PLAAF. Note that there are no GE images for year 2019 and 2023, thus you have to speculated what was the rolled out numbers of Y20 for these 2 years. Also noted that 4 seem to be the denominator for the rolled out numbers (exclude proto-type rolled out).

So annual production of all variants hovering around 15 so far? Should we expect higher rate starting from now with WS-20 in full production? For tankers: based off most recent numbers (at least 25 YY-20 + 11 Y-20B + 3 IL-78), they should have ~70 tankers in service at a minimum by about 2 years time from now?

Who else remembers the days when China was meant to get 34 x IL-76 + 4 x Midas Tankers from Russia ?

I remember thinking that China will have a very good cargo and air lift fleet if that deal goes through

fast forward into 2024 and look where we are