As usual, I’m taking a look at this time of the year of all the things
that has happened to PLAN. 2014 has been an active year like 2013, so
it’s a good time to look over what they are doing and where they are
going.
Aircraft Carrier - I think PLAN is making very cautious steps in
developing their naval aviation capabilities. CV-16 Liaoning spent a
large part of the year in Dalian going through regular maintenance and
overhaul before going on another long sea trial afterward. At this
point, I think the intensity of flight operation training still have not
increased much from when it first joined service. It looks like most
of the sea trials are aimed at testing out different subsystems (like
propulsion unit, electric generator, radar installations) and the sea
worthiness of CV-16. Most of the pictures of take off and landing
exercises are still taken with the J-15 prototypes rather than the
production ones. It’s quite possible that they are practicing takeoff
and landing on the land based training facilities before putting them on
the carrier. So in the upcoming year, hopefully we will see more J-15s
on CV-16 conducting carrier operations out in the sea. One encouraging
sign from this year is the abundance of new Z-18 based helicopters for a
variety of roles (transport, AEW and ASW/SAR) that seem to becoming
ready for service. The induction of these helicopters and training on
CV-16 is an important part of operationalizing CV-16.
Amphibious Vessels - After a couple of years of rest, they have
restarted the production of amphibious landing ships in Type 071 and 072
series. As I wrote the past few years, they have continued to conduct a
variety of new amphibious landing exercises with Type 071, 072, Type
726 LCACs, amphibious armored vehicles, Z-18 transports and even Z-10
helicopters in these exercises. I think they needed these years of
training and exercises to determine what changes needed to be made to
the newer Type 071/072s. It sounds like they originally planned for
this new batch of Type 071 to have more firepower but ended up going for
more lightly armed version like the earlier Type 071s. It will be
interesting to see what differences will be to accommodate their
developing amphibious warfare doctrine. I think the deliberate pace of
operationalizing and training Type 071 with the marines is a good
starting point of reference to see how long it will take them to develop
carrier operations. One would obviously expect carrier operations to
take longer to develop, but Type 071 spent its first couple of years
going through going through long sea trials and commanding flotilla that
we are seeing with CV-16 right now. At the same time, we can expect
the future LHD design to go through the same process that we have seen
with Type 071. They have shown numerous LHD designs for export in
various naval exhibit, but it seems like the domestic version will be a
lot larger with more landing spots and greater hangar space. Hopefully,
we will start seeing that late next year. The other amphibious project
is Zubr, which picked up pace this year when the Ukrainians delivered
the second one earlier as a result of the Crimea conflict. It will be
interesting to see how many Zubrs China end up building.
Large Surface combatant - There were 2 major developments this year with
the induction of the first 052D and the appearance of the Type 055 land
based simulator. The induction of No. 172 was surprising because the
last 2 Type 052Cs had not been commissioned at that point. Even now,
the commission status of the last Type 052Cs is a little ambiguous. It
seems like the induction of No. 172 was fast tracked to allow PLAN to
start testing out all the new systems that they have incorporated onto
and developing tactics on using it. The following 052D, especially the 4
other ones that are launched at JN shipyard, could really benefit from
the lessons they learnt from PLAN’s experience with No. 172. On the
other hand, the last 2 Types 052Cs were under no similar pressure, so
they’ve had a much longer induction process. I’m sure the actual crew
has already been training on them for a while (based on their photos
from the ZhouShan naval base with the 3rd and 4th 052Cs), so they have
yet to be inducted. The Type 055 land based simulator really caused a
lot of excitement earlier this year, because it had been speculated on
Chinese forum for a while now. Considering that PLAN has only built
similar simulators for carrier and nuclear submarine project, one can
surmise this platform is held with the highest regards. We have yet to
see Type 055 modules at JN or Dalian shipyard, but I think that will
start to come out next year as Type 052D production start to wind down.
Also, it would be interesting to finally see Dalian built Type 052Ds,
since JN is already so far along in this program. Finally, it sounds
like the Sov program will finally go forward with modernization. There
was a picture of one of the Sovs at the shipyard recently with a lot of
scaffoldings. Since they will have to replace all the Russian subsystem
with Chinese ones, I would think that the modernization would be even
more extensive than what we saw with the 2 Type 052A ships. Even though
this kind of modernization is quite costly, PLAN does prefer that to
decommissioning and building new ones. After that, the only candidate
left for modernization will be No. 167. I think retiring this ship in 5
years makes more sense than modernizing it again since it was
originally built as more of an experimental platform to test out
6000-ton class of surface combatants for PLAN. At this point, there is
not a lot of value to keep around such the only hull of this
experimental class.
.jpg_2.jpg "KC-46A Test Plane (First Flight)")
.jpg_3.jpg "KC-46A Test Plane (First Flight)")
.jpg_4.jpg "KC-46A Test Plane (First Flight)")
.jpg_1.jpg "KC-46A Test Plane (First Flight)")
