China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft
- Thread starter Totoro
- Start date
Looking back in time, it does seem that the fact whereby the Y(Y)-20Bs are being built to the MRTT configuration had already been officially hinted as early as August 2022.
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The article and tabulated data seems to have neglected the actual possibility of the Y-20B being built to the specifications of the MRTT (multirole tanker transport), rather than the presently-held-by-many view of separated pure airlifter and pure refueler variants. If all of the Y-20Bs are indeed being built as MRTTs, any attempt at classifying the Y-20B into separate airlifter and refueler categories will be moot.
Of course, this is not to say that the pure refueler variant of the Y-20B should be ruled out, especially if they are the only ones capable of refueling larger warplanes (bombers, airlifters and special mission aircrafts) of the PLAAF and PLAN - Either with a probe-and-drogue system with a larger fuel transfer capacity, or a (possibly WIP) flying boom system.
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As mentioned above, Y-20B being a potential MRTT is one of those things that they have declined to consider (or even aware of).
The graphs themselves are not great, frankly it would have been more useful to just have smaller individual graphs of aircraft types by airframe families/variants. Reading the graph as it is laid out, it's not exactly obvious at a glance as to how many actual "Y-20" airframes they project to be built per year.
The global export market prediction is as good as useless, and it seems they are still talking about the MC-X without having considered the fact that ROKAF intends to buy KC-390.
For these kind of graphs and projections they're generally not very useful for us, it's more about seeing how unreasonable their predictions are. In this case, "meh" is probably the best response.
I assume you mean "not to say that the pure refueller variant of the Y-20 should be ruled out" give what the rest of the sentence is.
The article said there are currently 48 Y-20A + 8 YY-20A and production for both are winding down/complete. The YY-20B is comparable to the KC-46 carrying about 80 tons of fuel.
Somewhere (may not be the same article) I remember reading that AWST thinks the economical rate of production is one per month based on the US experience and therefore 6 Y-20B + 6 YY-20B a year for the next decade. 8 YY-20B after 2030. Priority is YY-20B over Y-20B.
There is one sentence alluding to the MRTT concept: "Notably, YY-20s appear to be adaptable to airlift configuration by the removal of fuel pallets."
I sure hope there is just one version of the -B.
Yes, it's the pure refueler variant. Sorry for the mistake, correction made.
very bad chart..
they are heavily under-estimating Y-20 production from 2024 onward. just like they did with J-20. WS-20 finalized, Xian is planning for full scale production.