Military observers can anticipate more J-20s taking part in People’s Liberation Army drills after China’s domestically designed and manufactured fifth-generation super-fighter officially entered service last year.
Official media report that in the PLA’s first war-games of 2018, in Inner Mongolia, an unspecified number of J-20s engaged in a mock dogfight with J-16s and versus a battalion of anti-aircraft missiles.
None of the reports answer the question of the exact number of J-20s already in service and where they are based, however, as the focus of international observers shifts from the fighter’s specifications and capabilities to its production and deployment.
Chinese military columnist Xi Yazhou speculates, on the Shanghai-based opinion site The Observer, that the J-20 may still be at a low-rate initial production stage. The fighters are being built at the Chengdu Aerospace Corp., where augmenting output “is never as simple as adding some extra assembly lines.”
It may take years to achieve mass production, especially for a highly integrated and sophisticated stealth fighter like the J-20.
“China’s manufacturing sector has the reputation of pumping out products at an impressive speed, but even Apple had to carefully time its product release as per production status in China for its new iPhones, and it’s not surprising to see crunches in supply for more sophisticated warplanes as a whole plethora of factors ranging from parts to manpower determine the actual output,” writes the expert.
More than 100 Chinese enterprises are involved in supplying homemade engines, parts and avionics for J-20s, according to a PLA Daily report.
China has the expertise to develop a cutting-edge fighter like the J-20, yet its workforce and defense contractors may have become overstretched as they juggle competing orders from the military.
Revving up J-20 production is a systemic undertaking that requires coordination from numerous suppliers and subcontractors and the PLA must navigate a raft of logistics and quality-control hurdles.
Until then, the Chinese military may not have sufficient J-20s to support its aims of superiority in the skies.
The Soviet Union encountered a similar production bottleneck after the supermaneuverable Su-27 fighter’s introduction in 1985, when Moscow was anxious to press ahead with the modernization of its fleet. F-15 and F-16 fighters had already become the backbone of the US Air Force.
Defence industries under the then Communist regime were never able to churn out enough components to meet Moscow’s demands for 100 Su-27s and MiG-29s per year.
Thomas Daniel Kuhn so china is not prepared for the war?
Hahahahaha fake news
Perhaps the slow rate of production is because the Chinese want to avoid the boondoggle that was the F35 in the USA where a half finished product was delivered to the military with hundreds of glitches, exploding engines, lots of stuff that did not work. and still does not work. Along with a price tag that went through the roof , costing hundreds of billions more than the original projected cost. i am reminded of a Speedy Muffler slogan. " First you get good and then you get fast". The Americans never did learn that. Like their junk cars that they pour off the assembly lines, their war planes are not quality produced either. The Chinese want to avoid that Capitalist produced crap and build a quality product.
The key word is "Expert." The West, as it is with "Consultants" is over loaded with them and that is why they are sinking faster than the Titanic and everything they touch turns to shite.
What is this article about? China is having production problems with the J 20 because an unnamed expert says so? ????