Ask anything Thread (Air Force)

[THX 1138]

in total thats 1097 more 4th+ gen fighters

So, 1800+1097 = 2900


China is still just 50% of that number.

Personally, I think 4.0 gen aircraft are going to be obsolete by the mid-2030s. The new baseline for modernization should be 4.5 gen (i.e. 4.0 gen with AESA + BVR armaments). By my estimate, the US has about 2100 such aircraft, if we count the 600 F-16 that are supposedly scheduled for upgrades. The PLA has about 1100, assuming 240 legacy J-11B are all upgraded. That's a gap of about 1000 in modern aircraft.

From what I understand, Lockheed is expected to produce around 150 F-35 per year. Maybe 25% of that is intended for foreign customers. So about 110 F-35 will added to the US inventory per year. That's roughly comparable to the expected J-20 production rate. The PLA will have to gain ground by producing additional modern aircraft like the J-16, J-15B, and J-35. If the PLA adds a total of 50 such aircraft every year, it will take 10 years to narrow the gap by 500.

Of course there are other factors like the number of 4.5 gen aircraft the U.S. is retiring, and the NGAD and F/A-XX that may start production by the end of the decade. And who knows how many loyal wingmen are being produced by either country.

Overall, I think it will take 10 to 15 years for the PLA to catch up with the U.S. in the number of modern aircraft. But as I alluded to before, the U.S. military will be limited by the logistics of deploying those aircraft to the Pacific theater.

 

[grulle]

well right now we are talking strictly air to air combat. if China's vast SAM arsenal is taken into account then there shouldn't be much to worry about.

 

[ACuriousPLAFan]

anyone have good numbers regarding how many of each J-20, J-10C, J-16, J-11B are in service?

Best conservative estimate thus far:
J-20 = 200+
J-16 = 300+
J-11B = 300+
J-10C = 200+

any variant of J-11 uses AESA radar?

Any J-11 variants with the postfix "-G".

There's also the J-11D, which is meant to be equipped AESA from the get-go, but the variant was dropped in favor of upgrading the J-11Bs to the BG standard.

 

[grulle]

nice nice, nice to know China has 700+ AESA frontline fighters ready to go. any troublemakers coming to China will have to deal with them, in addition to the vast land based SAM arsenal, and of course the 6-7000 VLS cells of the navy. fortress China is mighty intimidating hahaha.

 

[Deino]

Guys, you are now much too deep into a forbidden topic since it is most political and far off-topic.

stop with this and any war-talk posts will be deleted

 

[Wrought]

To what degree are the J-10 and/or J-20 capable of operations on rough runways? The F-16, for instance, is noted to perform poorly under those conditions due to its intake placement, in contrast with Russian-designed fighters (which presumably applies to Chinese versions too). But the J-10/20 are not derived from Russian frames, so where do they stand?

 

[MELTY]

There should be a thread about PLAAF targeting pods. They seem to be very rare and there is barely any info on them

 

[Blitzo]

There should be a thread about PLAAF targeting pods. They seem to be very rare and there is barely any info on them

Your second sentence is why there is no thread for PLAAF targeting pods.

 

[MELTY]

Your second sentence is why there is no thread for PLAAF targeting pods.

And? You literally can say the same for anything PLA related. Why is there a thread about loyal wingmen/H-20? Those threads are 90% rumors and speculation. There's gotta be more open source info on pods than any of them.

Given how integral TGPs are to modern A2G operations, they deserve their own thread.
ECM pods are important as well. I'm disappointed to not find a single thread on those here.

 

[Blitzo]

And? You literally can say the same for anything PLA related. Why is there a thread about loyal wingmen/H-20? Those threads are 90% rumors and speculation. There's gotta be more open source info on pods than any of them.

Given how integral TGPs are to modern A2G operations, they deserve their own thread.
ECM pods are important as well. I'm disappointed to not find a single thread on those here.

The real world importance of TGPs is irrelevant to whether they deserve a thread or not, rather a thread for a given topic is created if there is expected to be productive discussion and tracking of rumours/information/pictures about them that can be held over time.

For things like TGPs or EW pods, apart from identifying a few types that exist and the aircraft they are mounted on and the rare instances we see them, we won't have any access to the sort of meaty information about performance, functions, and specifications that one may get for some foreign products.

And of course that is even more so for something as sensitive as EW pods.

On the few occasions that we do see a TGP or EW pod that is of interest, they can be posted in the relevant thread for the aircraft it was mounted on, or related threads (like air to ground weapons for TGPs).


The lack of meaningful information for TGPs and EW pods, and the lack of ability to have any meaningful discussion or tracking of progress apart from "yup, they exist" is why there's no dedicated thread for them. (Though I recall many years ago there may have once been a thread for targeting pods, but the fact it has not been used in a long time just demonstrates my point).