PLAAF Breaking News (including articles with Pictures or videos)
- Thread starter Jeff Head
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plawolf
Lieutenant General
One accident proves nothing.
F18s and F15s have been lost on many occasions due to engine failure, you don’t see people instantly casting doubt on western engines do you?
There is zero logical reason to leap from a single lost aircraft (the first involving a WS10 after all these years of use) to casting doubt on the engine or maintenance personnel.
Military jet engines push the evelope of pretty much everything to eak out as much performance as possible. That means there will always be a far far higher degree of risk associated with flying military aircraft compared to almost any other form of transport other than orbital rockets.
No operationally fielded military jet fighter or jet engine has ever, or will ever go its entire service life without loosing planes and aircrew to accidents.
There is often this rosy-eyed tendency with military fans to believe too much in the marketing of how safe dual engines are.
Yes, having as second engine is 100% more reliable that having just one engine. However, people often fail to appreciate that when military jet engines fail, they tend to fail catastrophically.
Those things often go off like bombs or missiles, with broken engine blades being launched in random directions, often with greater speed and energy than bullets. If those broken blades are launched into other parts of the aircraft, as invariably some will be, they can cause a hell of a lot of damage to key systems.
Quite often, an engine failure also result in an engine fire, and/or fires caused elsewhere on the plane from super hot broken turnbine blades embedded in the plane,and that can eat away at the structural integrity and key systems of a plane with alarming speed. What was a responsive and saveable plane could suddenly break up in flight or suffer catastrophic control failure in an instant. If that happens at low level and low airspeed during an approach run, they pilot may well not have time to even eject.
No amount of training or good judgement could mitigate pure awful bad luck sometimes.
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
And you think AL31F is safer There are confirmed 8 or 9 accidents of J 10 involving engine failure. NO engine is 100% fail proof
I don't think Al-31 is definitely safer than WS-10 and we know it isn't a great engine (evidenced by number of AL-31 failures that resulted in J-10 loss) but it does offer more thrust than anything Europe has manage to build. I think maybe there's a good reason single engine J-10 uses AL-31 over WS-10. To say they can't build them fast enough, do we really have the numbers to back up that claim? Maybe that is the case for WS-10 and CAC not using them though.
Jura The idiot
General
now noticed in Twitter:
Des avions de surveillance ELINT chinois traversent la 1ère chaîne d'îles
Translated from French by
Chinese surveillance ELINT aircraft cross the 1st chain of Islands
Des avions de surveillance ELINT chinois traversent la 1ère chaîne d'îles
Translated from French by
Chinese surveillance ELINT aircraft cross the 1st chain of Islands
Dubious since Xinjiang is so sparsely populated.
Quickie
Colonel
I guess it also depends on how the engine failed. A failure, with maybe an accompanying small explosion, that results in a sudden lost of all power may cause the plane to go into a spin. Otoh, a more gradual lost of power would give the pilot enough time to take control of the plane again, by adjusting to the unbalanced thrust of the single working engine.
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Jura The idiot
General
I now noticed in Twitter
Plus de 10 appareils militaires chinois survolent le détroit de Bashi
Translated from French by
More than 10 Chinese military aircraft fly over the Bashi Strait
I'm guessing
Hendrik_2000
is going to run the translation