China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft

asif iqbal said:

Yes but you missed one important aspect of all of this, distance

Being able to establish a "sky bridge" is the critical part, China as a pretty good transport fleet and can lift a lot of men and equipment but not very far

For range they need Y-20 and IL-76 for short hops they have a vast fleet of Y-7 and Y-8 plus Boeing airliners which they use also that's up to 80 aircraft

For for a air expeditionary force they need a lift of 50+ tons over many thousand kms

Having said that the China is working on lifting it's entire 15th airborne corps, thats 3 entire divisions of around 35,000 men, these special operations units are designed to be the fast mobile units for rapid reaction, currently they could mobilise 2 divisions within 48 hours if pushed for deployment within China

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在7月2日进行了地面滑行测试后，国产大型运输机运-20今天下午13时许在西部某试飞基地进行了飞行试验，整个试飞时间持续了近2个小时，继今年1月26日进行首飞之后，运-20于4月20日和4月21日分别进行了第二次和第三次试飞，今天这是运-20的第四次试飞。据分析，时隔2个多月后进行的本次试飞，表明运-20此前的3个架次的首飞阶段已经顺利结束，正式进入了调整试飞阶段，运-20的研制进展开始进入了一个新的阶段。

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Deino said:

Does anyone actually know how reliable the number of flights actually is: I mean, 4 flight within 5 months is not an impressive archievement. Not that I want to assume there are problems or so but I just want to ask if it is even more likely that there were already more flights, which are simply not spotted ??

Thanks in advance,
Deino

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asif iqbal said:

A lot of flight test programmes are done using computer model simulations, anything else is done by actually doing the flight

A400 first fight was in 2008, and I don't know how many flights it made but for the Y-20 4 flights in 5 months is quite good!?

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I think so, the most important issue is flight and crew safety, I think it's a good run so far, certainly Y-20 is moving much faster than any previous modern cargo heavy lifter

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Deino said:

Does anyone actually know how reliable the number of flights actually is: I mean, 4 flight within 5 months is not an impressive archievement. Not that I want to assume there are problems or so but I just want to ask if it is even more likely that there were already more flights, which are simply not spotted ??

Thanks in advance,
Deino

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asif iqbal said:

A400 first fight was in 2008, and I don't know how many flights it made but for the Y-20 4 flights in 5 months is quite good!?

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The A400M's maiden flight was carried out from Seville on 11 December 2009. The first A400M had flown 39 hours of test flights as of 9 March 2010. The second test aircraft's engines were tested on 18 March 2010 prior to it beginning test flights. The second A400M completed its first flight on 8 April 2010. The third A400M took to the air in July 2010. With this flight the three A400Ms have taken more than 100 flights, totaling 400 hours.

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i.e. said:

Typically in a Western Commercial program, the first flight is always a scramble to hit a milestone which is usually tied to a financial incentive/penalty for the company. So the management will do anything to whip the engineers to hit the first flight milestone. usually the next financial milestone is another point in the flight envelope (hit cruise, Vmo, altitude etc) and/or a major system (certain modes, autoflight system on line) so on and so forth.

Same in Military, except the penalty is program managment office breathing down your nech...which is a whole alot of less incentive then commercial penalty unless they threaten to actually cancel the program althogether.

On Chinese program it is the samething. except any major delay in program on the mil side means firing of the chief designer and the vice-director at the institute who is in charge of the prg.

So a massive scramble to hit a certain first flight date and then everything after wards is a rush to hit a next milestone.

in the massive scramble to hit a first flight they probably took a calculated risk and left bunch of things not working and put in many stop gap solutions. (just as they do in western programs). they have to spent the next couple of month going back and unwind all the temp fixes.

actually this process is not efficient at all for the final date. but it is really the only way right now to sufficiently motivate engineers not to slack off.

I have yet to experience or have heard a program that is not in this mode...

program management at this scale and complexity is very hard and it is a learned art. (MBAs can shove paper up their ars for I all care) unfortunately no one ever gets a chance to manage more than 2, and so no one is actually very good at this art.

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