broadsword
Brigadier
What we need to see now is land based EMAL take-off. The US has not conducted one yet.
PLAN Aircraft Carrier programme...(Closed)
- Thread starter bd popeye
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Excuse me? You are very seriously mistaken. The US most certainly has, and on numerous occasions. Starting in 2010, and now having launched several hundred times since.
F/A-18E Superhornet
C-2 Greyhoud
F-35C Lightning II
E/A-18G Growler
E-2D Advanced Hawkeye
T-45C Goshawk Trainer
...and each one numerous times. All the aircraft it plans for its future air wing, including the aircraft they will train those pilots with.
Here's a page by the US Navy that shows pictures of some of this:
As I said, the US Navy has thoroughly tested its EMALS and they are already installed on the new USS Ford, CVN-78, which has already been launched.
[video=youtube;RqU-ng0G_Z8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqU-ng0G_Z8[/video]
1st EMALS Launch, F/A-18E Super Hornet, December 2010
[video=youtube;r0hKE77bm_g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0hKE77bm_g[/video]
Latest EMALS Launch, E/A-18G Growler, January 2014
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That's some fine detective work there, Bltizo. Even if the articles, as latenlazy says, aren't directly to be linked to specific years.
Time for another one of my wild ideas now, one that doesn't necessarily go against what's already been known.
In some of the previous discussions I proposed it was plausible that next chinese carrier will have a ulyanovsk layout - with a waist cat and ski jump. It was pointed out that it would be illogical to use both, why not get rid of the ski jump. While i do agree with that (soviets didn't, though, for whatever reasons they had, possibly also decreased performance) i did come up with one semi-plausible explanation.
IF we see the ulyanovsk layout, here's what may've driven it: China has, for whatever reasons, skipped the steam catapults idea. It went straight to the emals. But, making EM cats work as desired is, as we know, quite difficult. Reading through the recent report on Ford class emals, it would appear that despite all the money they put in and all the decades of expertise, the cats won't achieved desired mtbf rate until 2030s. Meaning, they will do their job just fine a few dozen times maybe more, but their deterioration rate will drop, to the point where the mean time before failure will be order of magnitude worse than current steam cats. This is not speculation, it is in the report. They do expect MTBF will get better with developing the cats as they operate them, but it may take a decade.
So, if china is also doing emals, maybe it's a bit behind US and it will take it closer to two decades to get to an catapult that will be able to do high number of launches before failure. but at the same time, maybe the tech is deemed safe enough and good enough to turn into a workable catapult within 5 or so years, just in time for the next carrier. Key point being that the catapult works as advertised for x number of launches, x being 100 or so times less than what would be required for catapults on a pure catobar carrier.
In that case, say a catapult is ideally required to do 900 launches between a failure. and say the carrier is required to maintain 100 sorties a day. If it has two catapults, it'd mean every 18 days of such intense ops there'd be a failure. Perhaps that's acceptable for the navy. Now if the catapult works as advertised but it has just 90 launches between failure, we're down to less than two days of ops before catapult is out of action. And maybe failure here is not something that can be repaired on the ship in a matter of hours. Even if it can, having cats out of action for several hours or a day could be very detrimental.
BUT, if one has a plane as j15, producing good lift, and has a good weight to thrust ratio, then one can rely on ski jump ramp for all the j15 ops. why would one want a catapult as well? there's one critical piece of hardware that is better to put on a plane than a helicopter. AEW system. if some theoretical aew platform can not achieve decent performance taking off the ramp, then it may require a catapult. And since it's just one type of plane, perhaps 4 or so planes per carrier, then the overall sortie numbers wouldn't be too high. Putting two such cats (ulyanovsk had two waist cats), even with 90 launches per cat, would give a total of 180 launches for the aew wing. that might be enough for enough days of active duty to make it worthwhile. One could do 30 days of constant aew cover with so many launches. With such figures the bottleneck becomes maintenance of planes, not catapults. Of course, numbers could be more or less, who's to know.
Time for another one of my wild ideas now, one that doesn't necessarily go against what's already been known.
In some of the previous discussions I proposed it was plausible that next chinese carrier will have a ulyanovsk layout - with a waist cat and ski jump. It was pointed out that it would be illogical to use both, why not get rid of the ski jump. While i do agree with that (soviets didn't, though, for whatever reasons they had, possibly also decreased performance) i did come up with one semi-plausible explanation.
IF we see the ulyanovsk layout, here's what may've driven it: China has, for whatever reasons, skipped the steam catapults idea. It went straight to the emals. But, making EM cats work as desired is, as we know, quite difficult. Reading through the recent report on Ford class emals, it would appear that despite all the money they put in and all the decades of expertise, the cats won't achieved desired mtbf rate until 2030s. Meaning, they will do their job just fine a few dozen times maybe more, but their deterioration rate will drop, to the point where the mean time before failure will be order of magnitude worse than current steam cats. This is not speculation, it is in the report. They do expect MTBF will get better with developing the cats as they operate them, but it may take a decade.
So, if china is also doing emals, maybe it's a bit behind US and it will take it closer to two decades to get to an catapult that will be able to do high number of launches before failure. but at the same time, maybe the tech is deemed safe enough and good enough to turn into a workable catapult within 5 or so years, just in time for the next carrier. Key point being that the catapult works as advertised for x number of launches, x being 100 or so times less than what would be required for catapults on a pure catobar carrier.
In that case, say a catapult is ideally required to do 900 launches between a failure. and say the carrier is required to maintain 100 sorties a day. If it has two catapults, it'd mean every 18 days of such intense ops there'd be a failure. Perhaps that's acceptable for the navy. Now if the catapult works as advertised but it has just 90 launches between failure, we're down to less than two days of ops before catapult is out of action. And maybe failure here is not something that can be repaired on the ship in a matter of hours. Even if it can, having cats out of action for several hours or a day could be very detrimental.
BUT, if one has a plane as j15, producing good lift, and has a good weight to thrust ratio, then one can rely on ski jump ramp for all the j15 ops. why would one want a catapult as well? there's one critical piece of hardware that is better to put on a plane than a helicopter. AEW system. if some theoretical aew platform can not achieve decent performance taking off the ramp, then it may require a catapult. And since it's just one type of plane, perhaps 4 or so planes per carrier, then the overall sortie numbers wouldn't be too high. Putting two such cats (ulyanovsk had two waist cats), even with 90 launches per cat, would give a total of 180 launches for the aew wing. that might be enough for enough days of active duty to make it worthwhile. One could do 30 days of constant aew cover with so many launches. With such figures the bottleneck becomes maintenance of planes, not catapults. Of course, numbers could be more or less, who's to know.
Excuse me? You are very seriously mistaken. The US most certainly has, and on numerous occasions. Starting in 2010, and now having launched several hundred times since.
F/A-18E Superhornet
...and each one numerous times. All the aircraft it plans for its future air wing, including the aircraft they will train those pilots with.
Here's a page by the US Navy that shows pictures of some of this:
As I said, the US Navy has thoroughly tested its EMALS and they are already installed on the new USS Ford, CVN-78, which has already been launched.
[video=youtube;RqU-ng0G_Z8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqU-ng0G_Z8[/video]
1st EMALS Launch, F/A-18E Super Hornet, December 2010
[video=youtube;r0hKE77bm_g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0hKE77bm_g[/video]
Latest EMALS Launch, E/A-18G Growler, January 2014
Seriously, it's kinda foolish to compare with the US in carrier-related technologies...
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MwRYum
Major
Sure but inevitably you'd be compared with the "Industry's benchmark" to see where you're now...
But when compare with the US' facility with China's, you can't help but to agree that China's have yet reach the design certification stage, as the facility doesn't have any aircraft handling capability, much less to test launch an aircraft. So my benchmark on this, as it was and still will be, is when the naval aviation training facility build a new runway for the EMAL, or install the same at/near the existing runway. When that happens, you'd know that an aircraft carrier with EMAL is indeed on the schedule. And that can't be hidden from satellite view, even if Google Map is slow on stuff like that, media outlets eager for a scope can always pay a commercial imaging satellite photo of the area, and rant about it as some "explosive exclusive"...
MwRYum
Major
To infinity...and beyond!
Jeff, the coming Lunar New Year is this Friday, not that far.
Why is that? It is very natural to compare with the US in carrier-related technologies, and all things about carriers. There are numerous reasons, here are only a few:
1. USN is most experienced in carrier operations and technologies. Even if China is not going to copy everything from USN, it's extremely helpful to learn what USN has gone through and what their future direction/plan is.
2. As a benchmark to measure how far China has come in her carrier development and operations, as well as how far behind she still is.
3. Among all the nations that have built carriers or are building carriers, China's goals for building carriers are more similar to the US than to other nations, e.g. India, Russia, French, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Thailand. It's best to measure yourself against US than other nations. And that's exactly what China does.
In fairness to xiabonana, the context of his comment needs to be taken in consideration of the comment I was responding to that said:
1st comment said:
I believe xiabonan was simply indicating that it was foolish to make "that" type of comparison, not that any comparison would be foolish.
I think whether the PLAN adopts a ski jump + waist cat configuration is dependent mainly on whether they can maintain a sortie rate they want by simply having a four cat configuration instead. There are also other considerations, namely whether the extra aircraft spotting space of a pure CATOBAR layout on the bow may cancel out any disadvantages. Of course this is also dependent on how big the carrier is. A 65k ton carrier might not be big enough to accommodate two cats and a ski jump, and may only be large enough to have two cats (one bow one waist), who knows.
More importantly, we should also look at the assumptions for a ulyanovsk design -- namely, was there any credible evidence ever to suggest China had acquired plans for it? Personally I don't think there is.
----
I'm thinking back to latenlazy's revised summary of the articles and the speech, and I have a revised theory.
The idea is that they had both a subsized prototype and a full scale prototype by 2008, but only the latter is at the shanghai site. Looking my post 1835, and examining the first two pictures taken between mid 2008 when construction meaningfully began, and early 2009 when the work on the "catapult" seemed to have finished (with probably roof and other bits and pieces to be constructed), it could conceivably have been finished in late 2008.
Therefore, perhaps circle 1 was the first full scale sized prototype?
My idea is then, that circle 3 is possibly the revised full scale prototype built after a few years of testing on the first full scale prototype, possibly a production model to be run through the paces before actually replicating it at a base with aircraft to be trialled on it?
So, if we entertain the idea that the shanghai site is indeed an EMALS site, and if we try to fit the two possible narratives of the articles in, I get:
Scenario 1:
Circle 1 is the subscale prototype
Circle 3 is the full scale prototype
Revised Scenario 2 based on idea that a full scale prototype was already built by 2008:
Subscale prototype not at shanghai site
Circle 1 is first full scale prototype
Circle 3 is revised/production full scale prototype
I'm kind of squeezing the photos to fit the theory here, but oh well.
Some things to consider
I don't think the catapult will fail if properly built maintained and configured. Catapults will require constant & regular maintenance. And we are not really sure that China will jump head long into EMALs .. now are we really sure? I'm not.
In order to keep those aircraft flying a a good operational tempo they need regular daily maintenance. Otherwise they will become hangar queens. You need maintenance personnel that are trained on a particular aircraft and updated regularly.. to keep 'em flying.
There is no magic formula to keep those aircraft and the operation tempo running smoothly other than constant and deliberate "Real World" training and training and more training..And I mean REAL Training at SEA with the gear that they will be using.
They should be conducting;
Rig the barricade drills,
Firefighting Drills.
Engineering Drills
Real RAS and VERTREPS.
Weapons movement..loading and unloading.
Mass casualty drills.
Manuvering drills.
Man overboard drills.
General Quarters or Action Stations drills.
ENCOM drills
Real Darken Ship evolutions.
Etc..Etc.. Etc....
I don't think the catapult will fail if properly built maintained and configured. Catapults will require constant & regular maintenance. And we are not really sure that China will jump head long into EMALs .. now are we really sure? I'm not.
In order to keep those aircraft flying a a good operational tempo they need regular daily maintenance. Otherwise they will become hangar queens. You need maintenance personnel that are trained on a particular aircraft and updated regularly.. to keep 'em flying.
There is no magic formula to keep those aircraft and the operation tempo running smoothly other than constant and deliberate "Real World" training and training and more training..And I mean REAL Training at SEA with the gear that they will be using.
They should be conducting;
Rig the barricade drills,
Firefighting Drills.
Engineering Drills
Real RAS and VERTREPS.
Weapons movement..loading and unloading.
Mass casualty drills.
Manuvering drills.
Man overboard drills.
General Quarters or Action Stations drills.
ENCOM drills
Real Darken Ship evolutions.
Etc..Etc.. Etc....
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