China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft - esp. Y-20/YY-20
- Thread starter Totoro
- Start date
It depends, though. Soviet planes were designed for it as part of the short field landing capabilities, particularly the Il-62, so they were a feature of the D-30 engines.
For civilian airliners, yes. But I'm talking about military airlifters here.
There's this procedure called rapid combat/tactical descent, where military airlifters deploy their thrust reversers mid-flight, alongside engaging spoilers and flaps while pitching nose down during approach to and/or landing at destination airfield or airstrip. This is done to execute a quick descent and landing from higher altitudes within shorter durations in order to minimize the window of which the airlifter is being exposed to enemy threats from the ground (mainly human-portable weapons such as MANPADs) in contested/danger areas, while keeping the airlifter from reaching Never-Exceed Speed to avoid structural failures due to pitch down-induced over-speeding.
It's like slamming the brake mid-air, which is why mainline civilian airliners usually don't come with such feature (except the Soviet examples pointed out by @sheogorath above). And as long as the airlifter is designed for executing such maneuvers and the pilots are properly trained to do so, then there is no problem.
Here's one of the videos of a C-17 engaging thrust reversers in mid-air:
And here's what it looks like from the cockpit (another C-17):
So my question in the initial post is on whether the Y/YY-20/A/B are equipped with the same feature as the ones on the C-17. Would be pretty cool if the Y-20 family does.
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3x MA60(?)/600(?)s from a flight academy/university flying in formation.
No, not really.
These do not look like MA-60s but at least two of them are Y-7 bomber trainers with that strange side-attached cockpit
Nice and quiet high bypass sound!
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Y-20B spotted again, with sound.
I can see a serial number but I cannot read it!
Night drill
