It's not dirty, it's rust.
China's SCS Strategy Thread
- Thread starter lilzz
- Start date
It's nonsense. It just means the US is arming the Philippines to be a strike platform against the mainland.
lcloo
Major
My family home is about 200 meters away from South China sea, at an elevation of less than 10 meter above sea level. My former office was also just a few hundred meter from the sea.
The external air conditioner unit outside the building begin to get rust within a year, and the metal casing rusted through with holes within 3 years. The strong wing and salty air has several time corrossive power than that at distance of 1 mile or more inland from the beach. Also the higher the elevation from sea level the less corrosive is the air.
Long Term deployment of any aircraft, regardless whether they are J11A or J16 will suffer from the corrosive salty air, especilly if the hangars or runway are too close to the sea and also at low elevation ground.
He did not said J15T cannot be deployed. What he meant was cannot be deployed for long term otherwise depreciation (in commercial term) will be faster. especially aircraft with complex electronics. "几个岛礁机场到目前为止还是不能长期部署电子产品过于复杂的新飞机，比如歼16和歼15T，因为折旧比较快（高情商说法），长期部署容易速逝。"
The more complex eletronics deep inside the fuselage will be affected by the salty moisture, and it is much harder to wipe off the corrosive moisture and cleanse them inside the fuselage than just wipe the surface panels with fresh water.
To protect the aircraft from corrosions, abundant fresh water is essential for washing off salt moisture off the aircraft, and also air-tight hangar with air conditioning is a must. Since these islands obtained their fresh water mainland from rainfalls, they would need a desalination plant.
I am surprise that if they did not considered building air-conditioned hangars and desalination plants on the islands.
There is a reason why Guam airbase has air-conditioned hangars.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
They definitely need to invest in basically NBC graded aircraft shelters on those islands to allow for long term permanent deployment of advanced fighters.
To be honest, I think it was a bit of missed opportunity to not have installed HAS on those islands from the start, but then at the time they were still playing the diplomatic game of offering to not militarised the islands in exchange for US to basically abandon their plans to turn the SCS into a choke point for Chinese sea based trade.
Now building HAS also carries political consequences so it’s not really a question of cost, but probably waiting for a provocation by the Philippines sever enough to justify the building of HAS without giving the other claimants too much to bitch about.
To be honest, I think it was a bit of missed opportunity to not have installed HAS on those islands from the start, but then at the time they were still playing the diplomatic game of offering to not militarised the islands in exchange for US to basically abandon their plans to turn the SCS into a choke point for Chinese sea based trade.
Now building HAS also carries political consequences so it’s not really a question of cost, but probably waiting for a provocation by the Philippines sever enough to justify the building of HAS without giving the other claimants too much to bitch about.