J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VIII

[Blitzo]

I don't buy the push up 5th-gen fleet size as quickly as possible thing.
If that's the case, why PLAAF decided to get serious about J-35 only after the naval commitment?

Maybe because they only realized in the last few years that they realized how many 5th gen fighters they actually wanted to procure by XYZ year, placing time limit on them.

It may not necessarily be related to the PLAN deciding on J-35 (in fact we don't know which decision came first, in theory)

 

[latenlazy]

I don't buy the push up 5th-gen fleet size as quickly as possible thing.
If that's the case, why PLAAF decided to get serious about J-35 only after the naval commitment?

PLA seems to be in the middle of a sea change in its future force planning, perhaps also precipitated by geopolitical factors. These are short throw decisions that could easily have happened in just the last 2-3 years.

 

[tphuang]

it takes time to ramp up production. You need the supply chain to be ready and you need to make real investment in equipment, facilities and personnel to ramp up production.

By all appearance, the production ramp up has been pretty dramatic.

As i said previously, it will likely take SAC some time to ramp up J-35 production (just like it took CAC a few years to do with J-20). Even if you think SAC has the most advanced process ever, it still relies on supply chain. What is production rate for WS-21 or WS-19 looking like right now? What about all the different chips and electronics you need to put on there?

So until J-35 ramps up, you are going to need continued J-20 production increase. And the new factory space will help.

IIRC, J-20 production process improved a lot recently. That's how we have been able to see this huge production ramp up.

 

[ACuriousPLAFan]

I think the idea of increasing aircraft production facilities and either in terms of more floorspace, more personnel or giving work to SAC (per J-35A) are all very reasonable, and personnel demand/stress may well be one factor.

Putting my doctoring hat on, I do think that "dying from overwork" is a bit of an simplistic because "overwork" isn't a great risk factor by itself let alone a diagnosis. It is useful as a byline to argue for why reducing overall workload may be useful, but without knowing the specifics of individual's existing risk factors, cause of death, etc, I think it's reasonable to say that the phrase itself is a bit loaded.

What Yankee & Co. explained is that Chengdu AC's present production capacity of the J-20 has reached its celling/limit (with the metaphor "keep squeezing/pressing on it (J-20 production capacity) and you will squeeze/press out groundwater"). The need to handle the production of such huge number of J-20s, coupled with the additional workload associated with other concurrent projects in Chengdu AC (namely high tier UCAVs and J-XD) means that the workload/burden (担子) is becoming really heavy and the workers are getting more tired - Such that based on Yankee's source(s) of information, more than 2 people have passed away at their workplaces from illness due to being too tired from work (overwork) at the 611th (Chengdu AC) in the year 2023 alone.

If you still find the information refutable, kindly do find Yankee & Co. and argue with them about it.

I don't buy the push up 5th-gen fleet size as quickly as possible thing.
If that's the case, why PLAAF decided to get serious only after the naval commitment?

One of the reasons would be similar to how the higher ups of the PLA(AF) initially underestimated the F-35 production capability, as per the chief designer (总师) of the J-20.

 

[latenlazy]

it takes time to ramp up production. You need the supply chain to be ready and you need to make real investment in equipment, facilities and personnel to ramp up production.

By all appearance, the production ramp up has been pretty dramatic.

As i said previously, it will likely take SAC some time to ramp up J-35 production (just like it took CAC a few years to do with J-20). Even if you think SAC has the most advanced process ever, it still relies on supply chain. What is production rate for WS-21 or WS-19 looking like right now? What about all the different chips and electronics you need to put on there?

So until J-35 ramps up, you are going to need continued J-20 production increase. And the new factory space will help.

IIRC, J-20 production process improved a lot recently. That's how we have been able to see this huge production ramp up.

Unless SAC has just been preloading production capacity for the last few years, which I think might be what's happened. Rapid production ramp up might also just be a benefit of the manufacturing innovations they put into the design (building significant structural parts production around 3D printing and other digitally automated manufacturing processes should let you do this, since you remove a whole lot of training lead up requirements, especially on quality control).

 

[tphuang]

Unless SAC has just been preloading production capacity for the last few years, which I think might be what's happened. Rapid production ramp up might also just be a benefit of the manufacturing innovations they put into the design (building significant structural parts production around 3D printing and other digitally automated manufacturing processes should let you do this, since you remove a whole lot of training lead up requirements, especially on quality control).

supply chain is just sitting around for a few years with spare capacity not producing anything?

 

[latenlazy]

supply chain is just sitting around for a few years with spare capacity not producing anything?

More like supply chain was being built up before the plane finished development testing. If you can do low cost rapid prototyping and modifications to the design because it's all just CAD tweaks sent to digitally automated tools you don't have to lock down the design before you build the production lines. This is part of the advantage with flexible manufacturing paradigms. The "set up tooling" part of production ramp lead time can get abbreviated. In theory this means you can build production capacity in parallel to your development process, rather than do everything in sequence and wait for development to finish.

 

[tphuang]

More like supply chain was being built up before the plane finished development testing. If you can do low cost rapid prototyping and modifications to the design because it's all just CAD tweaks sent to digitally automated tools you don't have to lock down the design before you build the production lines. This is part of the advantage with flexible manufacturing paradigms. The "set up tooling" part of production ramp lead time can get abbreviated. In theory this means you can build production capacity in parallel to your development process, rather than do everything in sequence and wait for development to finish.

If you say so. I'm going to assume that it will take a few years to ramp up production so J-20 will be significantly increasing production over the next couple of years.

 

[Blitzo]

What Yankee & Co. explained is that Chengdu AC's present production capacity of the J-20 has reached its celling/limit (with the metaphor "keep squeezing/pressing on it (J-20 production capacity) and you will squeeze/press out groundwater"). The need to handle the production of such huge number of J-20s, coupled with the additional workload associated with other concurrent projects in Chengdu AC (namely high tier UCAVs and J-XD) means that the workload/burden (担子) is becoming really heavy and the workers are getting more tired - Such that based on Yankee's source(s) of information, more than 2 people have passed away at their workplaces from illness due to being too tired from work (overwork) at the 611th (Chengdu AC) in the year 2023 alone.

If you still find the information refutable, kindly do find Yankee & Co. and argue with them about it.

I actually consider their reasoning fair, and I don't particularly hold anything against it, but "overwork" is one of those terms where causation needs to be carefully attributed.

I'm going to assume that they must have some basis to view that the two deaths at work were relating to an increase in demand independent of existing health risk factors and independent of what could be normally expected when working at a major defense firm, but considering how casually those terms can be thrown around I don't think treating it with some caution is inappropriate.

Overall the idea of CAC having greater demands leading to more pressure on its personnel is something that is logical, and the need to both offload some demands for new 5th gens to other companies is also logical.

But without knowing the individual cases and the comparative stats with rates of other companies, yes I'm going to say that the "death from overwork" statement adds more questions than it answers simply because it becomes an emotive statement, and the argument for "CAC's increasing demands is leading PLA to explore more means of meeting demands without overstretching CAC" would be stronger without that inserted in.

 

[ACuriousPLAFan]

I actually consider their reasoning fair, and I don't particularly hold anything against it, but "overwork" is one of those terms where causation needs to be carefully attributed.

I'm going to assume that they must have some basis to view that the two deaths at work were relating to an increase in demand independent of existing health risk factors and independent of what could be normally expected when working at a major defense firm, but considering how casually those terms can be thrown around I don't think treating it with some caution is inappropriate.

Overall the idea of CAC having greater demands leading to more pressure on its personnel is something that is logical, and the need to both offload some demands for new 5th gens to other companies is also logical.

But without knowing the individual cases and the comparative stats with rates of other companies, yes I'm going to say that the "death from overwork" statement adds more questions than it answers simply because it becomes an emotive statement, and the argument for "CAC's increasing demands is leading PLA to explore more means of meeting demands without overstretching CAC" would be stronger without that inserted in.

Right. Let's just agree to disagree. Points didn't get through.