It's likely 7x Y-20s by now.
Interesting presence of a KJ-500 at Egypt as well.
China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft - esp. Y-20/YY-20
- Thread starter Totoro
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It's likely 7x Y-20s by now.
Interesting presence of a KJ-500 at Egypt as well.
The Y-20s returned to China rather quickly, so they're likely there for delivery.
To maintain design and production expertise, there has to be a constant flow of work. If the flow stops for just a few years, there will be knowledge gap (people moving to other jobs) that would be hard to rebuild again. This means that so long as this class of aircraft is needed in the forseeable future, there has to be works on the continious improvement and upgrade of Y-9 or a new design of Y-30. In this respect it doesn't matter if the aircraft is called Y-9XYZ or Y-30, they are essentially the same thing. The need of developping Y-30 is the same need of production of Y-9.
A good example in industry is telecom 4G, 5G and now 6G, even though most users of 5G do not feel the difference from 4G, the industry has to keep the R&D running (yes reshuffling codes for feature improvement without fundamental differences).
An opposite example is Russia losing human competence due to stopage of weapon development, or US loosing capability in shipbuilding etc. An engineer in the 20s and early 30s is in learning stage, in late 50s the person is enterring the stage of waiting for retirement, it is only less than 20 years being the most productive time and you need to make sure this generation is handing over their experiences to the new comers. Involved in the full flow (> 10 years) of developping just one type of aircraft is a luck.
This is also why China has this "produce a generation, develop a generation and study a generation". It is a infinite loop of maintainging the flow.
Did they mention any other specifics? I'm especially curious how the range & WJ-6Cs compare to the 130J.
anyone have any reasonable guesses based on anything not 100% pure random guess atm? afaik Y-20 has 7500km range or more with 40tons, and 4500 km or so with max weight. Urumqi to Cairo is like 5150km, so with them stopping in dubai, it seems to be packed to the brim if that helps.
Reasonable guess of... what? Are you asking what the Y-20s may have been carrying to Egypt?
It could be anything from personnel, maintenance and spare equipment to support the J-10 and KJ-500 contingent that is participating in the EAF+PLAAF exercise, and/or may carry some elements of an air defense system that has also been rumoured.
Who knows.
It's probably a bit presumptuous at this stage to think the journey was to carry a delivery for equipment purchased by Egypt, though it can't be ruled out.