China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft

Deino said:

Huitong has updated his site with a new Y-20A carrying a serial number that "could" be 41xxx!

We have been fooled so often before & especially since the image is so much blurry and the flag looks also clearly psed I'm actually not really sure whether the picture is even a photo!

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Deino said:

Another set of YY-20A images and again my question, since I think we still had no conclusive answer on this issue: Are no. 20846 and 20546 different aircraft or is 20546 the renumbered 20846?

Since if not renumbered, this would mean that there are indeed two separate serial number batches of 2054x & 2084x numbers and in fact it would raise the number of built YY-20A tankers dramatically?

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tphuang said:

I would think this invalidates the theory that 2084x tankers got re-numbered?
It seems like the longer term goal here is to have 20541 to 20949. We might be getting there next year. Producing 15-20 Y-20 tanker variants per year shouldn't be that difficult.

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Deino said:

Why would this invalidate the "theory that 2084x tankers got re-numbered"?

My problem is, that if they are not renumbered then we would have almost 40 tanker - IMO a bit too many even more so in one regiment (the 38th AR) - now and why then adding them in such a non-pattern system with some numbers left out and the starting again with 2054x numbers? By the way, with production being changed to the Y-20B/YY-20B, are there already enough old ones built to fill all missing numbers?

If you take all individual numbers known so far, then there are almost 20 available, some with 2054x/2064x and some with 2084x/2094x numbers but overall a number quite realistic to a standard regiment and according to the production numbers "estimated".
If they are indeed all individual numbers - and assuming in the end there will be all missing ones filled in - then we would have a monster-regiment with numbered from 20541 to at least 20947 (as the highest number known) = 47+ tanker!

In the end with the additional almost 60 regular transports, I think these are a few too many? Or am I wrong?

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tphuang said:

are those photos you posted all for recent times? If they are, then my question is why would they re-number 2084x to 2054x and then add 2084x again?

The demand in China for Y-20 series is probably 300-400 over the life time. Why would 50 tankers be too many? I would think they need 150 tankers at least. Maybe 200.

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