JF-17/FC-1 Fighter Aircraft thread
- Thread starter johnqh
- Start date
What's the point when there is J-10?
J-10 vs. J-10 would be interesting!
Shilao talked about this last night on his podcast. Whilst Pakistan is doing a great job advertising JF-17, particularly to other Muslim countries some potential customers may have issues with buying weapons from a Muslim country for all sorts of historical or political reasons (eg: Serbia). Getting PLAAF to buy some means when dealing with those type of customers they could deal exclusively with China to avoid such baggage.
If China bought say 3 dozen in 'Aggressor' roles, would that help? Or does it have to be the full PLAAF front line (which is not going to happen)?
Well Shilao's own suggestion is some of the units around Beijing who are still flying J-7 and who are very unlikely to encounter foreign aircrafts would be good candidates.
JF-17 may not be as good as J-10C but it sure beats any J-7 variants.
The pain is having to support another aircraft in the inventory I guess. But I mean if it's okay to support 24 Su-35 it shouldn't be a problem to have 24 JF-17 either.
I was also an audience of the podcast. I agree that if PLAAF equipped some JF-17s the birds could be advertised and AVIC might have some more revenue. However, my question is what benefits PLAAF can get from this?
Operationally the PLAAF gains nothing but experience And that‘s IMO the reason why this won‘t happen.
In fact I agree, such a unit “could“ indeed assist sales to certain countries, but if this is it worth to establish a new chain of support, maintenance and so on without any performance gains in comparison to the J-10 is another story.
Not directly related to JF-17, but in my head I had thought part of the draw for the Motor Sich deal for the private company would be to try to license build/assemble things like L-15 or JF-17 in Ukraine to be “Made in Europe” and appeal to these Eastern European countries. Of course that was dead even before what’s going on right now.
I doubt it. J-10C does not require imported components and would hugely simplify logistics compared with JF-17.