Mid-air refueling training
China's transport, tanker & heavy lift aircraft
- Thread starter Totoro
- Start date
if this picture is real then this should be the mass production model after finalization.. hugeee
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lcloo
Captain
I have a feeling that the yellow paint is faked. It is easy to change colour in photo editing. Though I wish I am wrong.
lcloo
Captain
You do have a good point here. Let's look forward to see a photo of grey color PLAAF Y20 with WS-20 engine soon.
It will also be a PS
Now that we are finally getting to mass production of Y-20B with WS-20 engine (reported going into service next year), I wonder if this is when production for transport and refueling variants really take off. I remember listening to an interview from Zhuhai 2018, where the person being interviewed by Shilao crew said that they need 10x the number of IL-76 order that they put through in 2005. That would put requirement at 300 to 400. Clearly, that hasn't happened yet. So, I feel like Y-20 production is a little bit like J-20. The initial batch in Russian engines is suboptimal. As such, they didn't produce it at as high of a level as they could. Now that they have the engine that they want for Y-20, I wonder if we will see a huge ramp up here at XAC. Has their factory space expanded? Maybe something like 40 a year eventually. That's the level they would need if they want 200 Y-20 and 200 YY-20.