J-15 carrier fighter thread

[GiantPanda]

Some thoughts on this topic.
2. The J-15T may have better range/payload performance than the J-35 with external weapons loadout.

I think it is a given that a heavy fighter would have far greater range and load than an aircraft with medium class engines designed for stealth. Stealth and performance planforms do not always match up.

But on top of that, the Flanker airframe has famously immense load and fuel capacity. The Navy needs a multi-role fighter like the J-15 for the foreseeable future just like the USN still flies the F/A-18 variants. It might cede the CAP and A2A roles in missions to the J-35 but certainly not the strike roles.

 

[bsdnf]

J-15T with PL-10&15.

So the J-15T we saw before was purely consuming inventory

 

[ACuriousPLAFan]

J-15T with PL-10&15.

So the J-15T we saw before was purely consuming inventory
View attachment 154910

The full photo.

 

[mack8]

Lol, maybe the PLANAF chaps were reading how us numbnuts were fretting a few days ago why only PL-12 and PL-8 seen on J-15 to date and they decided to indulge us. So there we have it, J-15T at least uses PL-10 and PL-15 as standard. Thanks PLANAF!

 

[bsdnf]

Guancha trio mentioned during a recent livestream that the Liaoning aircraft carrier set a record of 90 takeoffs and landings in a single day during exercises two weeks ago. Even excluding over 20 helicopter sorties, the daily sortie rate of 50-60 is still quite high. Aside from training factors, a significant reason is the substantial improvement in the operational performance of the J-15T.

After all, the J-15 is the PLA’s first carrier-based aircraft, and many carrier-specific design features were not adopted, even with the T-10K-3 as a reference. The Su-33 was also the Soviet’s first heavy carrier-based aircraft, they had limited experience either—the T-10K and early Su-33 were essentially half-finished products. The current J-15T represents the results of over a decade of operational experience and improvements inspired by U.S. carrier-based aircraft designs.

As for the J-35, being a completely new product developed from scratch, its operational performance will undoubtedly reach even higher levels (though, predictably, the maintenance demands of stealth technology will offset some of these gains).

 

[supersnoop]

Guancha trio mentioned during a recent livestream that the Liaoning aircraft carrier set a record of 90 takeoffs and landings in a single day during exercises two weeks ago. Even excluding over 20 helicopter sorties, the daily sortie rate of 50-60 is still quite high. Aside from training factors, a significant reason is the substantial improvement in the operational performance of the J-15T.

After all, the J-15 is the PLA’s first carrier-based aircraft, and many carrier-specific design features were not adopted, even with the T-10K-3 as a reference. The Su-33 was also the Soviet’s first heavy carrier-based aircraft, they had limited experience either—the T-10K and early Su-33 were essentially half-finished products. The current J-15T represents the results of over a decade of operational experience and improvements inspired by U.S. carrier-based aircraft designs.

As for the J-35, being a completely new product developed from scratch, its operational performance will undoubtedly reach even higher levels (though, predictably, the maintenance demands of stealth technology will offset some of these gains).

I always thought the idea of the J-15 as a clone/copy of the Su-33/T-10K was simply a lazy idea, but it just takes a google search to see how common this thinking is. Of course there are external similarities to the two, using similar launch platforms and the same engines means the physics will be similar, it is a given. That being said, there was 30 years between the Su-33/T-10K and J-15, magnitudes of improvements in CAD, why in the world would China need to reverse engineer it? Plus as you mentioned, the Su-33 was pretty much half-baked, meant for the uncompleted Ulyanovsk.

 

[lcloo]

SU-33 was designed to be used on Vayarg. Thus designing J15 using Flanker airframe based on T-10K is the obvious choice since China already has production lines for J11A/B at that time.

However, J15 is not a clone of SU-33, there are a lot of differences other than the airframe. Example, look at the cokpit of SU-33, it is defferent from J15

SU-33



I don't have cockpit image of J15 but since J15 came after J11B, it should have similar cockpit. This is image of J11B.

 

[PersianPrince]

Guancha trio mentioned during a recent livestream that the Liaoning aircraft carrier set a record of 90 takeoffs and landings in a single day during exercises two weeks ago. Even excluding over 20 helicopter sorties, the daily sortie rate of 50-60 is still quite high. Aside from training factors, a significant reason is the substantial improvement in the operational performance of the J-15T.

However, Liaoning's 700 sorties in 15 days (about 47 sorties per day) still doesn't reach Shandong's record of 570 sorties in 9 days (63 per day) in October/November 2023, during which Shandong even had no J-15T aboard.

even with the T-10K-3 as a reference

The prototype China got from Ukraine is T10-K7.

 

[mack8]

A further enquiry on the topic of AAMs, has there been any hints that the J-15T at least (since it's the latest variant) might be able to carry the PL-17 LRAAM?

 

[00CuriousObserver]

This Thursday’s Guancha stream specifically mentioned that the maintenance performance of the J-15T is significantly better than that of the older J-15, especially in that a single maintenance access panel [my addendum: at the front of the plane] can be used to service over a dozen different components.

This Weibo post contains 18 high-quality close-up photos of the J-15T from Zhuhai, many of which illustrate the above point. I'm not going to post them all here due to the amount, but they're certainly worth a look.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!