Hello everyone,
I'd like to discuss an issue regarding the J-15. The J-15 has a major flaw: its 3x2 pylons, including the wingtip ones, are located on the outer, folding section of the wings. This means the J-15 cannot be armed with weapons unless its wings are unfolded, which severely impacts deck operational efficiency. In contrast, aircraft like the F/A-18 series and the F-35C have most of their hardpoints on the non-folding section. This results in the J-15 having only 6 "quick-load" hardpoints available in its folded state: the 2 under-intake pylons, 2 wing-root pylons, and 2 centerline fuselage pylons, in addition to the 6 non-quick-load pylons on the folding wing sections.
That's just a design characteristic which it retains from the original T-10K (and Su-33 I suppose) airframe configuration and is not able to be changed practically due to the inherent structural nature of the wings. And even if they wanted to change it, they wouldn't be able to just "fit in" additional wing stations on the inboard wing sections, -- they'd have to do painstaking structural redesign to increase the width of the aircraft's folded footprint by shifting the wing folding joint "outwards" which will increase the size of the aircraft's overall folded footprint, thus reducing deckspace efficiency for what is already a huge aircraft -- so choose your poison.
But one way of viewing the difference between J-15/T and its generational peer -- the F-18E/F Super Hornet, is that even though the F-18E/F technically has 9 stations that can be accessed during a folded state compared to J-15/T's 6 stations that can be accessed during a folded state, we should remember that J-15/T does not need (nor can it carry) external fuel tanks.
If a Super Hornet is conducting a normal combat mission, chances are two or three of its "accessible" 9 stations will already be used by external fuel tanks, only leaving six or seven actual payload stations, which is not too different from J-15/T.
Then there are some basic operation/procedural measures that can be done to mitigate the weapons station matter for J-15/T -- for example, it is not uncommon for carrierborne fighters to still carry SRAAMs on their wingtip stations when folded. In the case of J-15/T, they can simply include a pair of BVRAAMs in addition to the pair of SRAAMs that they would have as part of their normal folded payload complement, and to have the rest of the 6 stations on its fuselage and innermost wing parts, to be used as "flexi" stations for different payloads.
Furthermore, there's another issue: the non-folding wing-root pylons can interfere with the main landing gear, imposing restrictions on the shape of the munitions.
The pylons you refer to are the inner most wing pylons -- they exist on similar locations with other Flankers that have the "three underwing station + one wingtip station" configuration, such as the Su-30 line as well as Su-33 line.
J-16 has a similar station, and as we have seen in the past at Zhuhai 2022, it was able to carry large diameter A2G weapons on the innermost station (the same location as J-15's "non-folding wing-root pylon") fine, such as the 1ton PGM or the AKF-98A ALCM, in the pictures below. I would say if you're able to carry something like AKF-98A on that station then that's pretty flexible and expansive to me.
(Note, for the Zhuhai static display, the third outermost underwing pylon is not installed, however that pylon would only really be used to carry a SRAAM usually anyhow, see third picture with red circles for the appearance with pylons installed -- for PLA Flankers those are basically exclusively for SRAAMs like PL-8 or PL-10)
However, I recently saw a diagram showing that the J-15T (the catapult-capable variant) has further reduced the width of its folded airframe from 7.4m (on the Su-33/J-15) to 7.1m. Doesn't this exacerbate the problem? Is this diagram authentic? What could be the reason for such a modification?
I'm not sure if that is the case. I've seen no clear indicators that the folded wingspan has changed between J-15 and J-15T.
