Equation
Lieutenant General
For countries like Indonesia and Greece with lots of islands with no runways that could use sea planes for commercial use.
Chinese Aviation Industry
- Thread starter FriedRiceNSpice
- Start date
For countries like Indonesia and Greece with lots of islands with no runways that could use sea planes for commercial use.
Let's see if it will work.
There were lots of such proposals in a variety of roles back then, all of them lost to either land based proposals, helicopters or something else.
For aerial SAR at least, i don't see it working.
I think the role as fire fighters is the biggest advantage flying boats are offering today, everything else is just a secondary role so that they have uses outside the "fire season" making it easier to justify the cost of buying them.
If they turn out to be efficent fire fighters I can imagine them being exported all over the world (though in small numbers), just because there isn't much of a competition in this role.
Canada can use a few of them for forest fire and seach and rescue
(1)Canada bying Chinese is rather unlikely, not before some geopolitical earthquake. Not impossible completely, but you can imagine this shitstorm.
(2)Of all countries, Canada has CL-415, which is purpose-built water bomber. Furthermore, they have a recent history of subsidizing air industry.
Competition is either CL-415(much smaller, but purpose-built), Be-200(also jack-of-all-trades type) or US-2(purpose-built SAR, ridiculously expensive, though).
And, perhaps the worst, hordes of old retiring military and civilian cargo planes.
Which aren't nearly as convenient, but they carry alot and they are as cheap as dirt.
For always poor firefighting communities it's important...
As a Californian, I’m groaning.I think California needs a few too.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Such planes can also be very useful for disaster relief. When a typhoon/hurricane tears through island communities, often there is significant damage to infrastructure, and it may take days or weeks to get airports back up and running, if the islands had airports to start with.
Such seaplanes just need the weather to calm a little and they can land to offload supplies and/or rescue teams and evacuate casualties.
Such large seaplanes will also be immensely useful for large scale SAR, like if a large ship with a lot of crews and/or passengers goes down.
Such seaplanes can fly much further and faster than helicopters, and once on scene, they can land and either take on all survivors, or act as a mobile support base to help keep all the survivors alive until more help arrives to take everyone if there are too many survivors for the seaplane to carry.
Planes like these can save countless lives in the Mediterranean where so many overloaded migrant ships/boats had gone down.
Sadly, that is just an academic capability, as not only would politics make a sale to those European countries nearly impassible, I also don’t see any one of those European governments caring enough about refugee lives to spend hundreds of millions on a fleet of such seaplanes.
But those are all secondary functions. I see the primary function for these seaplanes as to help logistics in the SCS.
All the big islands only have a single airport with limited runways, so having such seaplanes that can land in the harbour and offload/load passengers and cargo at the peer will be immensely useful to help easy the burden on the airports.
It also means the PLA can airlift on men, supplies and heavy equipment even if the runways where damaged.
These seaplanes will also be able to service all the Chinese held islands that do not have an airport.
Such seaplanes just need the weather to calm a little and they can land to offload supplies and/or rescue teams and evacuate casualties.
Such large seaplanes will also be immensely useful for large scale SAR, like if a large ship with a lot of crews and/or passengers goes down.
Such seaplanes can fly much further and faster than helicopters, and once on scene, they can land and either take on all survivors, or act as a mobile support base to help keep all the survivors alive until more help arrives to take everyone if there are too many survivors for the seaplane to carry.
Planes like these can save countless lives in the Mediterranean where so many overloaded migrant ships/boats had gone down.
Sadly, that is just an academic capability, as not only would politics make a sale to those European countries nearly impassible, I also don’t see any one of those European governments caring enough about refugee lives to spend hundreds of millions on a fleet of such seaplanes.
But those are all secondary functions. I see the primary function for these seaplanes as to help logistics in the SCS.
All the big islands only have a single airport with limited runways, so having such seaplanes that can land in the harbour and offload/load passengers and cargo at the peer will be immensely useful to help easy the burden on the airports.
It also means the PLA can airlift on men, supplies and heavy equipment even if the runways where damaged.
These seaplanes will also be able to service all the Chinese held islands that do not have an airport.
They can't, AG-600 isn't R3Y. Others the same.
On the other hand, for military transport planes only basic infrastructure is necessary, as well as relatively short strips.
For truly useful SAR Shinmeywa-like border layer control or other form of nondisturbing STOL feature is very desirable.
Seaplane shall be capable of landing and surviving in a stormy weather. Disasters tend to happen in a bad weather more often than not.
