yea i guess so. that sucks had hopes for a Chinese ~250t transport
China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft - esp. Y-20/YY-20
- Thread starter Totoro
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in 2016 agreement signed with Antonov for second unfinished aircraft and aircraft would roll out from assembly line in 2019 as per the schedule.. but deal collapsed as Ukrainian government intervened on behalf of US.. they didn't want Chinese to grab such a strategic machine.
AVIC even started the construction of largest assembly hall for any aircraft in the world at that time. but eventually things didn't go well.
as per the information, Antonov didn't even have full blueprints of AN-225 except some drawings and research papers. major technological work and finance provided by the Chinese side.
same story repeat with Motor Sich.
god what a fucking waste. of course America had to come in and ruin everything. china could have had a fleet of upgraded an-225s flying around if it was not for them.
yes. China was planning for AN-225 production.
AVIC has always been fascinated by the super large strategic airlifter. they didn't have technology back then include Engines so they tried to purchase AN-225 and Motor Sich for D-18T. now things have completely changed. there is heavy research going on from different AVIC institutes.
in 2016 during Zhuhai air show-
Zhu Qian, head of AVIC's large aircraft development office, China will develop transport jets that are even larger than the Y-20, like the US' Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and former Soviet Union's Antonov An-225 Mriya.
There are rumors, AVIC Xian institute currently working on super heavy strategic airlifter.
I frankly wonder what they were hoping for. Antonov was done for in 2014, disconnecting it from Russia was a death sentence.
Beyond the military, there are definitely civilian applications that would benefit from a 600+ tonne MTOW lifter. The An-225 was a quite active aircraft. It was carrying turbines, wind turbine blades, generators and even train wagons around. None other aircraft could do these.
there is an urgent requirement of 500-600 tons MTOW strategic airlifter. it has more civilian use than military ones. China is a superpower sometimes you need urgent airlifting in short time. even it will be domestically useful.
To me the Y-15 ,seems like what An-70 was trying to be, since the main limitation in practice by frontline airtransport is volum limited and not weight limited.
You would run out of space first before you hit the 20t weight limit. That why the C130J-30 exists.
So making a bigger volum plane is more critical then it's payload weight.
But then again we don't know what the bigger picture is , capability wise I am not sure that PLA consider the Y-15 ability to carry type 08 or type 04A for 1000KM to be critical, but it probably would want a transport that is capable of supporting Light-CAB .
Using the US numbers as a baseline here , an Infantry-CAB would need at least 40t a day to fight ,60t if you want optimal, so for the Y-15 that 2-3 sorties, so I think the PLA will be happy as long Y-15 can fit the Type 161 with it's ammo fly it for 1000KM and get it on to a dirt road operationally.
You would run out of space first before you hit the 20t weight limit. That why the C130J-30 exists.
So making a bigger volum plane is more critical then it's payload weight.
But then again we don't know what the bigger picture is , capability wise I am not sure that PLA consider the Y-15 ability to carry type 08 or type 04A for 1000KM to be critical, but it probably would want a transport that is capable of supporting Light-CAB .
Using the US numbers as a baseline here , an Infantry-CAB would need at least 40t a day to fight ,60t if you want optimal, so for the Y-15 that 2-3 sorties, so I think the PLA will be happy as long Y-15 can fit the Type 161 with it's ammo fly it for 1000KM and get it on to a dirt road operationally.
The An-70 was slightly larger than the A400M and had more internal volume so it would probably be a different category, and it had propfans instead of conventional turboprops
Suggests we should have a separate thread for Y-15 (XX), since it's in a different league to Y20.