Reuben F. Johnson

Senior officials of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and PRC MoD have reportedly decided that for the immediate future all additional aircraft carriers will be reverse-engineered analogues of the current Russian-design Liaoning aircraft carrier No. 16. The decision, made in a December, 31 2015 announcement by an official MoD spokesman, indicated that the follow-on Chinese carriers would be designed using only “domestic technology,”

 


The upcoming fleet of PLAN carriers will not only be using a Russian-developed configuration for the ship, but the aircraft to be operated from them will be the Shenyang J-15, which is a reverse-engineered copy of the Sukhoi Su-33 carrier-capable fighter that was developed from the famous Su-27.

 


The main feature of the Liaoning that the PLAN chose to keep is the ski-ramp bow for takeoffs of the fighter aircraft operated from the ship. Formerly known as the Varyag, the carrier was sold to the PLAN from the Ukrainian Nikolayev shipyards in the 1990s. The combined ski-ramp and aircraft-arresting system is the same as was used in the design of its sister ship, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which is in service with the Russian Navy.

 


Following its sale to the PLAN, the Varyag was towed halfway around the world from Ukraine, where it finally ended up in the Dalian shipyards for more than a decade of re-fitting. The new PLAN carriers will be built in the same shipyards, where they reportedly will make use of the “lessons learned” from the work performed on re-fitting and modernizing the original Russian design. However, the new carriers will use new-age materials that will make them lighter and create more space for more aircraft.

 


PRC defense specialists told media outlets that the decision to retain this Russian design was primarily due to the need to have new aircraft carriers “that will be capable of combat as soon as possible.” Chinese shipyards had spent years studying the feasibility of building carriers with a catapult launch system, but changing to this configuration would have delayed service entry of new carriers by a number of years.

 


In addition, it would have required a complete re-vamp of the training regime for PLAN carrier pilots and a re-design of the J-15. By “sticking with what they know,” said a U.S. Navy contractor with years of carrier-design experience, “the Chinese are going to make sure that they turn out new carriers in the shortest time frame possible.”

 


These new carriers are also going to carry a much lower price tag than if the PLAN had elected to build ships that use a catapult launch system similar to that used by the U.S. Navy, as well as the French Marine National and the Marinha do Brasil. “Two of the most expensive subsystems aboard the more conventional carriers are the catapult and the nuclear reactor power plant,” said the U.S. Navy contractor. “Since the Chinese are using neither, their ships are going to be much cheaper to build, as well as easier to maintain.”

Future Chinese Aircraft Carriers to be Russian Design

Despite years trying to develop their own designs, the Chinese have decided it can’t wait, and it will be cheaper to use Russian designs.

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