i am fully aware i've talked about this before but i'm hoping maybe someone has some new info. just how is it possible that so many J7II regiments are still active? According to Scramble, those are all planes produced roughly between 1980 and 1986. (give or take a year)
Either those planes have been flying something like 100 hours per year since then (for a total per j7 pilots of i guess 75 hours, not more) or those planes are engineered in a totally different fashion from basic mig-21, having many more hours in their airframes compared to basic mig21, or the usually accepted figures about j7 regiments and years of production are flat out wrong.
as far i could find, basic mig21 was to have 2400 hours. of course that can be extended, like indians did with theirs to get them to 3400 hours. They tried to get them to 4000 hours but it reportedly proved impossible (within their budget). While i could accept the redesigned j7e/g variants to also have a longer life airframe from the get go, it doesn't seem plausible J7II model would have had anything like that redesigned from the original mig-21 plans.
right now i'm leaning towards those J7II regiments being really third-rate regiments for occasional air policing, but not really doing much flying or much exercising. With no more than 100 hours per plane one could still keep that whole fleet in the air, i guess, and that seems like the easiest explanation. Question would be: why do that? Why keep so many pilots as third rate pilots without proper training? If one wants to save money, wouldn't it be more cost effective to just cut all those regiments and do it years ago?
The only remaining explanation i can think of is that plaaf does intend to have all those regiments up and running as full time and fully trained regiments - once they get new planes. maybe there was a lack of money during the last 5-15 years but maybe they think it's cheaper in the long run to keep the pilots and infrastructure going, even if it's just half of flight hours per year as many as they'd want to, then to retire all those regiments, lay off the ground crews and pilots, and then go with re-starting all those regiments anew in another decade or so...
Either those planes have been flying something like 100 hours per year since then (for a total per j7 pilots of i guess 75 hours, not more) or those planes are engineered in a totally different fashion from basic mig-21, having many more hours in their airframes compared to basic mig21, or the usually accepted figures about j7 regiments and years of production are flat out wrong.
as far i could find, basic mig21 was to have 2400 hours. of course that can be extended, like indians did with theirs to get them to 3400 hours. They tried to get them to 4000 hours but it reportedly proved impossible (within their budget). While i could accept the redesigned j7e/g variants to also have a longer life airframe from the get go, it doesn't seem plausible J7II model would have had anything like that redesigned from the original mig-21 plans.
right now i'm leaning towards those J7II regiments being really third-rate regiments for occasional air policing, but not really doing much flying or much exercising. With no more than 100 hours per plane one could still keep that whole fleet in the air, i guess, and that seems like the easiest explanation. Question would be: why do that? Why keep so many pilots as third rate pilots without proper training? If one wants to save money, wouldn't it be more cost effective to just cut all those regiments and do it years ago?
The only remaining explanation i can think of is that plaaf does intend to have all those regiments up and running as full time and fully trained regiments - once they get new planes. maybe there was a lack of money during the last 5-15 years but maybe they think it's cheaper in the long run to keep the pilots and infrastructure going, even if it's just half of flight hours per year as many as they'd want to, then to retire all those regiments, lay off the ground crews and pilots, and then go with re-starting all those regiments anew in another decade or so...
J-7 was designed primarily as air-superiority fighter&interceptor, and so is J-10. It is only natural to convert J-7 regiments to J-10 . On the other hand, J-8 is more of heavy fighter, so it is more logical to convert those units to Flankers (although some did convert to J-10) . As far as I know, no Q-5 units converted to J-10. 
