The Q-5, J-7, J-8 and older PLAAF aircraft
- Thread starter adeptitus
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If only they were a little proactive they could’ve gotten an aerial kill against the Vietnamese Reconnaissance aircraft.
【87年击落越军战机-哔哩哔哩】
Any further news or rumors on those old J-5s and J-6s being converted into high-speed kamikaze drones?
That’s in fact mostly hyped-up old stuff. The J-6W is known since years and even if still a few are operational, it is on the Edge of being retired and replaced by GJ-11 according to the latest News. And there is No operational J-5 drone.
lcloo
Major
It is inevitable that those old J6 drones are being phased out due to high logistic costs, maintenance costs and operational costs.
You will need to have big physical spaces to store them, depriving other drones/aircraft from using these spaces at the air base. Then you have to keep inventory for replacement parts which are no longer in production, and you have to keep teams of ground crew who you can better deployed for latest aircraft in service, and so on.
New suicide drones are much smaller, use far less fuel, minimum maintenance, minimum ground crew requirment, no time consuming pre-flight checks/preparation like fueling, battery charging, oil check, checking functioning moving mechanical parts and so on.
You will need to have big physical spaces to store them, depriving other drones/aircraft from using these spaces at the air base. Then you have to keep inventory for replacement parts which are no longer in production, and you have to keep teams of ground crew who you can better deployed for latest aircraft in service, and so on.
New suicide drones are much smaller, use far less fuel, minimum maintenance, minimum ground crew requirment, no time consuming pre-flight checks/preparation like fueling, battery charging, oil check, checking functioning moving mechanical parts and so on.
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But the GJ-11 isn't kamikaze is it? I was just thinking because China has thousands of these old air frames, this might've been a good use for them since they're way faster than your typical kamikaze drones, but of course if the cost of conversion is too high then it's likely not worth the trouble.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I suspect it’s actually much more likely the other way around, that China kept those J6/7 drones around as a jobs programme to keep the old timers who serviced those jets their whole careers in work until retirement as those guys are far too old to retrain, nor would it have been worthwhile to invest the time and resources to retrain them for newer types when they only got a few years left before retirement.
Basically, the costs of converting the jets were already spent, so keeping the drones around wouldn’t have cost that much money, as these are drones after all, so it’s not like you need to keep flying them, so the requirements for spares and fuel was probably quite minimal. The bulk of the costs associated with them was probably in the form of storage costs (or opportunity costs more likely), and the wages of the ground crews themselves.
Now that those old timers have mostly retired, they are also retiring the converted drone fighters because the economics of keeping the drones would no longer make sense with the old timer ground crews gone.