The E-2 was exported wide enough, and has been around for a long time, so China likely had enough access to reverse engineer the design in a significant way. As for why China did this, there are worse things they could do. Since China has no prior experience designing such an aircraft copying the main aspects of the E-2 design reduces risk. The only non-US design they could have easily accessed was the Yak-44 but that never entered service. So who knows what problems the design has.
KJ-600 carrierborne AEWC thread
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
There is "copy a design" in the scope of copying Tu-4 from B-29 through reverse engineering every little bit.
Then there's "copy a design" where you pursue a very similar planform and configuration but have to do everything essentially from scratch in terms of testing and development and important subsystems like propulsion, flight control, avionics etc, like Z-20 and Blackhawk relationship.
KJ-600 is very much the latter rather than the former -- a design where they clearly had something in mind already when they started working on it but would've had to do the actual testing and engineering themselves not to mention development of the relevant subsystems.
Then there's "copy a design" where you pursue a very similar planform and configuration but have to do everything essentially from scratch in terms of testing and development and important subsystems like propulsion, flight control, avionics etc, like Z-20 and Blackhawk relationship.
KJ-600 is very much the latter rather than the former -- a design where they clearly had something in mind already when they started working on it but would've had to do the actual testing and engineering themselves not to mention development of the relevant subsystems.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the Tu-4. For one the Soviets used metric instead of imperial measurements, so they basically had to reimplement everything, from metal sheets to nuts and bolts. One of the most complicated elements, the engines, the Soviets already had licenses to build earlier generation 9-cylinder single row Wright Cyclone radial engines. The Soviets already had a program which started before the war to make a twin row version of the engine with 18-cylinders. So reverse engineering whatever was left to reverse in the engine, the turbochargers, was not particularly complicated. Again, because of differences in design of the engines because of metric vs imperial, the Soviet engines ended up with 6% more displacement.
In the KJ-600 we might be seeing much of the same happening. It might superficially look the same, but likely the dimensions are not exactly the same, nor the materials. In this case the landing gear at least looks somewhat different to me, and for sure they have not slavishly cloned the engines in the E-2. The electronics are also quite likely very different. It is basically a copy of the airframe done to save effort in designing something suitable for carrier ops. So comparing it with the Z-20 is not that far fetched.
In the KJ-600 we might be seeing much of the same happening. It might superficially look the same, but likely the dimensions are not exactly the same, nor the materials. In this case the landing gear at least looks somewhat different to me, and for sure they have not slavishly cloned the engines in the E-2. The electronics are also quite likely very different. It is basically a copy of the airframe done to save effort in designing something suitable for carrier ops. So comparing it with the Z-20 is not that far fetched.
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Most people are well aware about the differences between the Tu-4 and the B-29, and I am aware of the development path that Tu-4 had from B-29.
I am explicitly saying that I doubt KJ-600 took a similar path -- i.e. I don't think they took the schematics of an E-2 and every little dimension of an E-2 and tried to copy it as close as possible. Bulkheads, cross sectionally, many things apart from key subsystems and changes in manufacturing and measurement conversions would have been left the "same".
For KJ-600, I suspect they looked at the requirements they wanted, found that it was pretty similar to an E-2 and designed the aircraft from the ground up knowing that it would look quite similar to an E-2 but that if you took bulkheads and cross sections of the aircraft it would be rather different (even leaving subsystems aside).
Putting it another way -- Z-20's airframe is Blackhawk inspired but not a copy of Blackhawk, and similarly KJ-600's airframe is E-2 inspired but also not a copy of E-2.
That is different to say the Tu-4 to B-29 relationship, or indeed the Su-27 to J-11B relationship.
I think some members here are simply junior intelligence professionals, who thought that it might be a extremely cost-effective ways to get some work-worthy intel to feed their bosses and gain their pay checks without much real effort. Because, hey, how much effort does it take to post a simple question on a forum? And who knows, there may even be a bored Chinese military insiders who simply had too much free time and are too drunk to adhere to security protocols.
I think the KJ-600 looks what a E-2 could look like with 60 years of aerodynamic and material improvement. The base E-2 design is ancient
This is a misconception, and was pushed for years here in the West.
Edit: Gelgoog beat me to it, and provided details.
Well that's just plain wrong. The superior UK solution below:
I guess that you are joking. Any designer who copy that design should be excuted.
IMO, British jet fighter design after WWII is very different from rest of the world (US, USSR, France and Sweden) if we look at the shapes, wing shapes etc. But I don't know why they made those choices.
On the contrary, the Gannet was a highly successful carrier borne ASW and AEW aircraft, widely exported with 347 built:
I'll grant you the basic design is a little dated now, but then so is the E2.