Like I said before, with the exception of some land based AWACS and ELINT types most of the fighters will be transferred to PLAAF.
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- Thread starter Jeff Head
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Like I said before, with the exception of some land based AWACS and ELINT types most of the fighters will be transferred to PLAAF.
This plan (geddit??) will take a long time to implement though, surely? Also, who will provide the fighters for the SCS artificial islands going forward? PLAAF or PLANAF.
Perhaps more JH-7 and J-8 and maybe even some J-11 could be converted to drones.
And how soon will this be accomplished? In fact, how could they have done it already yet? They have so many shore-based fighter units still to convert and at best only two J-15 units?
I think probably a more pertinent question would be what would happen to the PLANAF pilots trained on the non-carrier types like the J-10 and the JH-7 i.e. would they be converted to J-15s, or would they retain their ratings and be folded into the PLAAF instead?
Until fairly recently most J-15 pilots were poached from shore based navy aviation units, which includes J-10 pilots.
There's still the obviously large discrepancy between the no. of pilots in how many fighter regiments there are within the PLANAF, and two carrier wings' worth of J-15s the PLAN has already fielded and assigned pilots for.
Needless to say I'd like to see how the PLAN is gonna resolve the influx now that there're more NAF pilots than there are J-15s for them to fly in the meantime.
Like I emphasized until recently. PLANAF carrier aviation training has been reformed for several years and many new J-15 pilots are trained exclusively at naval academy.
But how does that resolve existing NAF pilots and their assignments within the service, though, when their aircraft are being transferred out?
Is the PLAN gonna re-train hundreds of them from the combat regiments alone, on the hundreds of J-15s that they currently don't have?