The old patern of a few weeks rest and a few weeks at sea. I wish they would increase the intensity of their training by going out to sea more often. Why do they need to spend so much time in port anyway ? The crew of the Liaoning has been working and living on that ship for more than a year. They know their tasks and the ship inside out by now. They have qualified about 20 pilots now if each time they go out to sea they qualify a batch of 5 pilots per sea trial. The J-15 is suppose to be in production from the middle of this year. So then they have all the pieces in their hands the ship, the crew, the pilots and the aircraft is in production. So how long will it take before they put all those pieces together ?
I hope to see some night flying this time.
This is China's first carrier. They are literally writing the book on carrier ops as they go along. They do not have an established set of procedures that they can just teach their crews and pilots and train them up. They also need to establish those procedures in the first place, which can be time consuming.
I think the long breaks in between going out to sea is to allow the crews and pilots to be debriefed so that their experiences and thoughts can be compiled, reviewed, analysis, codified and ultimately refined and improved upon.
It would be simply a waste of time if they go out regularly and train their crews up perfectly in a set of procedures which ultimately proved to be flawed or wrong.
Some mistakes are obvious to spot, others can only be revealed by actually doing stuff in the field. To that end, it would not surprise me if the PLAN have multiple crews each trained in rival theories in key areas like deck handing, hanger procedures and what not each competing with each other so the PLAN can evaluate what the best method is and cut down on trial and error time.
The Chinese place great emphasis on building strong foundations, and start slow. But that earlier hard work will pay off later as you build on that foundation and can accelerate your progress from a position of strength with little risk of earlier cut corners co in back to haunt you later on.
It is a pretty much the first lesson young Chinese are taught, and that principle is reinforced throughout the academic lives of pretty much all Chinese students, it can be seen in all the big projects the Chinese government and most Chinese companies embark upon, so it would be out of character if they did not apply that principle to the Liaoning.
Right now the PLAN are laying the foundations. It may take them longer, but when they are done, they will be able to almost mass produce carrier crews and pilots and probably the carriers as well very quickly and build up a large carrier fleet in a fraction of the time it took with the Liaoning because they would have learnt all the important lessons they can learn from their slow by but methodical work with the Liaoning.
