PLA Navy news, pics and videos
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
While not as vicious as the Cape, South China Sea is known for sudden bad weathers and unpredictable rough seas.
GEVs, are gonna behave like boats during rough weathers.
But it has the fragility of a plane (it has to fly) but not the durability of a boat.
I'm assuming China is experimenting as always, but unless they solve the practical issues around GEVs, I don't see PLAN adopt them on-mass.
Yeah, what you are describing basically is a sea plane that can fly "high" like a plane, and also take advantage of the gound effect when the conditions are right, for fuel efficiency.
Good weather reports/predictions are also needed to allow it to avoid/get-away from any storm/sea-condition with high waves that can reach up to the wing (SCS waves can reach 15m+).
Looks like Chinese DARPA (what do they call their DARPA?) and the American DARPA are going head-to-head on this:
Hmm, you are the second commenter to say something like this, maybe I'm missing something. Just to be completely clear on what we're discussing, even a very large ekranoplan would not be as high above the water level as a Ford-class CVN, generally 3-15m + the height of the vessel, compared to the ~70m above the waterline the Ford-class reaches. One big difference is that an ekranoplan can go ~500km/h, rather than e.g. 60km/h. I would not generally think of a Ford-class CVN as a "sitting duck for enemy AAMs", I don't think most avionics systems would even let you shoot an AAM at a surface vessel without at least some modification or a safety screen or something, the ocean surface is very cluttered on radar in a way that isn't true of the open air around a plane. In terms of where an ekranoplan is going to be, for the most part they are going to be where any other surface vessel is going to be, on the ocean (or a few metres above it, in this case). Just because ekranoplans look very much like a weird ugly plane, does not mean they're actually planes, even if a Class-B demonstrator can go up to hop over something. They're more like a very fast ship.
So I guess, is there something I'm missing here? Do surface vessels have some sort of unusual weakness to air-to-air missiles or surface-to-air missiles that I've not heard of?
There's that.
And here's a B-52 (which is roughly about the size of the Lun ekranoplan (if not slightly smaller) while about 160 tons lighter in terms of MTOW) doing a close-up fly-by near the USS Ranger back in 1990. Both the Lun and B-52 certainly don't fly at 50-60 km/h.
Besides, terrain-hugging cruise missiles (which typically fly at high-subsonic speeds) can fly at about the same altitude as this B-52 and the ekranoplan, and are much, much smaller in size. Yet, they are also easy to target and intercept once detected and tracked by the enemy.
In fact, there have been academic papers suggesting that contemporary PLAN surface combatants are capable of intercepting such types of cruise missiles that are flying as low as 2 meters above the sea surface.
So there's that.
Last edited:
Cross-posting from the PLA Air Force News thread.
On the US side, here's a RIM-7 CIWS doing so.
Here's a SM-2 SAM doing the same against a supersonic target missile.
It is pretty much expected that the PLAN fields similar capabilities today.
As you noted, naval SAM systems can do this, thank you for letting me know. What I'm confused by is the idea that an air-to-air missile can or would do this. After learning that naval SAMs can target things so low I'm not going to make any assumptions, so I'll just ask: what sort of air-to-air missile system would be used to target a vessel a few metres above the sea level, and in what conditions could that happen?
Virtually any sort of contemporary air to air missile (WVRAAM, BVRAAM) can target a sea skimming target (whether it's a cruise missile or a large ekranoplan), if it's launched from a aircraft that is within its engagement envelope. Naturally that will differ depending on whether it's a fixed wing aircraft or a helicopter and the range of the missile itself, but generally speaking for the purposes of discussion, if you are a semi modernized 3rd generation fighter aircraft (think J-7E) equipped with something like a PL-8, you will probably be able to target a sea skimmer if it happens to be within envelope for you to be vectored for intercept.
Anything more capable than that -- 4th gens, 4.5th gens, with more capable missiles like more modern WVRAAMs or let alone ARH BVRAAMs -- will be even more capable of targeting sea skimmers than the aforementioned modernized 3rd generation aircraft.
If the sea skimmer is higher speed (supersonic for example) or has signature reduction measures, then your interceptor aircraft and air to air missile will need to be correspondingly more capable, as well as ideally having more forewarning (datalinked in with supporting AEW&C, naval and ground IADS etc to enable better intercept flight paths etc).
So really the better question to ask is -- what sort of air to air missile system would be unable to target a vessel/missile/ekranoplan that travels a few meters above sea level??
And the answer is -- very few.
Think of Ekranoplans as having most of the disadvantages of a fixed wing aircraft in terms of vulnerability/damage resilience -- that is to say, it is basically able to be mission killed if not outright destroyed by a relatively low mass air to air missile or SAM (as opposed to proper naval combatants, which required much heavier AShMs to damage or destroy)...
... while also having most of the disadvantages of surface vessels -- e.g. to operate at essentially sea level of surface vessels -- without having the endurance of surface combatants or the mass (payload, sensors, damage resilience, fuel) and unable to operate effectively in anything beyond benign sea states.
Alternatively you can think of an Ekranoplan as a fixed wing, relatively slow speed aircraft that has to fly at sea skimming altitudes, with its only comparative advantage relative to a normal fixed wing aircraft being that it can be larger and have greater endurance (but still lower endurance than a proper naval vessel).
The applications of such a type of platform is rather limited. The only practical use of it I could see would be if it were scaled up sufficiently to operate as a transport for very benign sea states in an environment where you have complete air and sea control.
I cannot see such platforms being useful in a combat role or even combat support role.
Last edited: