The ongoing trials of China’s first aircraft carrier and her ship-based jet fighters represent a major leap ahead in capability for the People’s Liberation Army Navy. But the hype surrounding Lioaning’s debut test cruise last summer and the inaugural landing of her J-15 fighters in late November masks an important truth, one the world’s other carrier powers have long known.
Developing a flattop and its planes is hard, requiring years of trial and error and no small amount of risk. And while China’s ascent as a naval power might seem unstoppable, the saga of China’s first seagoing fighter pilots proves otherwise. A lot of things can, have and will go wrong, casting into doubt whether Beijing will possess a truly useful carrier capability any time soon.
There have been at least three close calls involving the small force of experimental J-15s since the Chinese navy established its initial carrier aviation task force in late 2006. The accidents and near-accidents are detailed in a remarkable story published this week on the Chinese website Sina — remarkable because Sina gets its information directly from state-run media outlets, which rarely cop to mistakes on the part of the mighty Chinese military.
In the first of the incidents, all of which took place between June 2011 and last November, an unnamed aviator — referred to only as “Test Pilot C” — was preparing to land his J-15 at the main military flight test center in Xi’an in central China when a warning light flashed red, indicating a hydraulics leak.
The emergency was not exactly surprising. The J-15 is an unlicensed copy of a variant of the Russian Su-27. China’s other Su-27 knockoff, called the J-11B, has serious quality-control issues. “The J-11B program is in big trouble,” a U.S. source told Defense News. “The Chinese have lost a lot of aircraft in crashes.” It looked like Pilot C might become the next casualty.
The aviator hurried to lower his plane’s landing gear before the hydraulics totally failed. “Test Pilot C firmly held the steering column, preoccupied with maintaining the aircraft’s balance,” Sina reported. He touched down, but no hydraulics meant no brakes. The airfield’s ground crew activated the crash barrier — most likely a pop-up cable that can be snagged by the jet’s tailhook — and the J-15 mercifully came to a stop on the runway.
Some time later, “Test Pilot B” was performing mock carrier landings when his J-15′s speed “suddenly reduced.” One of the jet’s two engines was failing — a fire and explosion could soon follow. Pilot B quickly calculated his speed, height and distance from the runway and “decisively switched the problem engine off.”
Only the air-traffic controllers had any idea how close Pilot B was to crashing. According to Sina, all that the other airfield personnel saw was a J-15 gently gliding to a landing.
A third incident was more dramatic. “Test Pilot A” was simulating arrested landings, using the J-15′s tailhook to catch steel cables stretched across the runway in the same configuration as Liaoning‘s own arresting gear, which allows an incoming plane to stop in only 100 feet. For this trial, the J-15 rocketed down the runway at 125 miles per hour without taking off, aiming to catch one of two wires at the opposite end of the airstrip.
Pilot A snagged the first wire, but it failed explosively, snapping and “pounding the [plane's] tail into the air” with a “bang.” “The people who witnessed the scene were all scared into a cold sweat,” according to Sina. But the second wire held and the speeding J-15 lurched to a halt.
On Nov. 23, Pilot A was among the J-15 fliers tapped to be the first to land on Liaoning, sailing off the Chinese coast. At 9:08 in the morning, he touched down, snagging the second of four wires. The deck crew reportedly broke into applause. At great risk to its pilots over a period of years, China had proved it could perform the basic functions of an aircraft carrier.
Performing those functions routinely, and safely — to say nothing of doing them under the stresses of actual combat — is another matter. If the recent past is any indication, China still has a ways to go before its nominal carrier capability becomes a meaningful one. VIDEO
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