Friday 5 December 2008
Military personnel sent to Ukraine to further aircraft carrier ambitions
The nation’s military has been sending personnel to an aircraft-carrier pilot base in Ukraine for training - further proof of the ambition to build its first aircraft-carrier battle group, a Canadian-based military magazine said yesterday.
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Military personnel sent to Ukraine to further aircraft carrier ambitions
Minnie Chan
4 December 2008
The nation’s military has been sending personnel to an aircraft-carrier pilot base in Ukraine for training - further proof of the ambition to build its first aircraft-carrier battle group, a Canadian-based military magazine said yesterday.
As early as 2006, the People’s Liberation Army sent a large naval delegation headed by an unidentified naval deputy chief to the Ukrainian Navy Aviation Force training centre in Odessa and Sevastopol, the Kanwa Asian Defence Monthly reported yesterday, citing an industrial source from Ukraine.
Chinese military personnel spent most of their time with the well-known “Research Test and Flying Training Centre at Nitka located in the Crimean Peninsula - a traditional training base for aircraft-carrier pilots” during the Soviet era, the magazine said.
The report said the two sides discussed the possibility of having Ukraine help China train its navy aviation force and aircraft-carrier pilots.
A recent report by the magazine said the PLA had obtained from Ukraine one prototype of the T10K, a maritime variant of the Sukhoi-33 fighter jet, for research and as a model for the development of its own ship-borne fighter jets.
The PLA’s military co-operation programmes with Russia and Ukraine were now more centred on large aircraft and the aircraft carrier, the magazine said.
It said the T10K ship-borne fighter China bought was originally based at Nitka, Ukraine. The centre is equipped with all types of simulation modules. The takeoff and landing simulation module, which the PLA cannot produce on its own, teaches pilots how to land on a short runway at a speed of 250km/h.
A Shanghai-based military expert said earlier that support vessels for a Chinese aircraft carrier had been built in Shanghai and two other major shipyards in Tianjin and Dalian in Liaoning.
In an interview with British newspaper the Financial Times last month, Major General Qian Lihua, director of the Defence Ministry’s foreign affairs office, said the world should not be surprised if China built an aircraft carrier.
In October, a Russian industry source told Jane’s Defence Weekly the PLA Navy was seeking to buy carrier-based Sukhoi-33 multiple-role fighter jets from the Komsomolsk-na-Amure Aviation Production Association on the Amur River, bordering China.
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