Chinese air to air missiles
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
So PAF would have known the real reach of the missile is much more than 150km otherwise they wouldn't fire it at 200km away.
No wonder US military is interested to talk with the Pakistan high ranks.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Even the venerable PL12 had a pure passive anti-radiation homing mode. Although IIR, that mode was more geared towards AA so it isn’t as optimised or effective in SEAD/DEAD, especially if the radiation source stopped emitting, in which case the PL12 would go pitbull instead of flying to the last radiation signal location as a true ARM would.
With AESA seekers and more modern electronics and processors, the likes of the P15 and PL16 can most certainly also feature such passive homing modes for AA, but there will be certain hardware components they will not want to include that true ARMs should have, which will make them always inferior to a dedicated ARM of similar size and technology level.
The key question of whether they would bother to retain the passive homing capacity on the PL15/16 will probably depend on how they found the feature worked in practice on the PL12. And may even be a bit of a moot point, since if they can get the PL15 seeker to work in LPI mode, then that gives you the benefit of a no/minimal warning shot as passive seeking would provide, but also retain the advantages of active radar homing.
One could argue that retaining such a capability would give basically every fighter some modest SEAD/DEAD capability, but again the question of whether that is worthwhile will depend on how the feature worked in practice in testing.
There are simply too many unknowns right now to make a definitive conclusions. But if it is later revealed that the PL15/16 retained the PL12’s passive homing capability, then that could allow us to make a lot of educated guesses about how effective the PLAAF found that feature on the PL12.
Could be effective range VS max range.
Unfortunately China has already moved on to PL-16…
It is said PL-16 is already in active service with J-20s, it is possible(speculation) the next gen naval air force(J-15T/J-35) could skip PL-15 and go directly to PL-16 for compatibility and simplifying logistics instead of simultaneously supporting 3 different types of missile, PL-12/PL-15 and PL-16.
What does skipping supporting PL-15 mean? The plane’s software can’t fire PL-15?
It can, but it would increase logistics so they might just standardize with PL-16 instead
Eh, that was what I think they implied in the podcast. Perhaps they do not yet want to show PL-16 publicly?