Right, I just got back from a week’s trip in China, and was lucky enough to stay a few days in an area with a J10 unit.
It was the first time I saw J10s in the wild with my own eyes, and it was a great feeling the first few times (its amazing how quickly something like that became ‘ordinary’, although the sortie rates might have had something to do with it, that and the heat!)
I mostly saw them on take off, and they tended to head straight out to sea for proper training, so nothing special to see, except the sortie rate.
Those boys were putting up serious sorties rates the few days I was in the area, with multi-ship launches pretty much standard. Multiple twin ship flights were going up within an hour, and they were doing this pretty much all day from early morning into dusk, with a major mass launch just as the sun was setting (although it was pretty quiet the next day, so maybe they were winding down after such an intensive burst of activity).
There were also FT2000s, and those went up in numbers alongside the J10s, I’m guessing for DACT.
Locals didn’t seem particularly impressed by any of this, so it seems to be pretty standard.
This fits in pretty well with the heavy JH7 sortie rates I saw last time I was back a couple years ago.
It looks to me like the PLAAF is taking training extremely seriously in recently years.
The planes were too far for me to get much details when they were in the air, and I only managed a split second glimpse of a J10 in a hanger when my flight was taking off (they have stepped up their game with opsec at the airport, which is dual civilian and military, giving civilian passengers almost no chance to see much on arrival or departure), but I distinctly remember a grey radome, which suggests J10Bs or Cs, although that was the only J10 I saw, so cannot say if the whole unit based there are B/C equipped, or if it’s a visiting plane from a different unit.
Edit,
Just to add, I rarely saw J10s go up with tanks, and many if not most seemed to be packing dual rail PL12 loadouts (again, hard to see definitely at the ranges I was from them, but the rails/missiles under the wings were definitely the same length and very close to each other).
FT2000s often packed tanks, and looked a lot sleeker live than in photos. So much so I didn’t recognise them until the second or third time I saw them.
No photos?
