China’s ‘chubby girl’ transport aircraft enters PLA service

Homegrown air transport marks ‘crucial step’ in projection of power

China’s largest ever military aircraft entered service on Wednesday, a hulking transport capable of sending troops and tanks around the world at a moment’s notice.

The Y-20 Kunpeng, nicknamed “chubby girl”, arrives at a time when Beijing is plotting a new global mission for its 2m-strong People’s Liberation Army, from peacekeeping in Africa to anti-piracy in the Indian Ocean.

The aircraft, which is equipped with Russian engines, has a cargo capacity of 66 tonnes, making it the world’s largest military transport currently in production.

The Y-20 “marks a crucial step for the air force improving its strategic power projection capability,” Shen Jinke, PLA Air Force spokesman, told state news agency Xinhua.

Experts say the Y-20 bears a marked resemblance to the US Boeing C-17 transport, which has not been produced since last year. It can carry a single Type 99 tank, China’s most advanced, which weighs about 50 tonnes, along with troops and other equipment. It has a maximum range of 7,800km partially loaded — roughly the distance between Beijing and Cairo.

Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert, said about a dozen of the aircraft would be operating within the next year or two, and eventually 200-300 would be produced. The Y-20 will gradually replace the fleet of Chinese Y-8 and Russian Ilyushin 76 cargo aircraft, the current workhorses of China’s military airlift capacity.

The Y-20 makes China only the third nation in the world to design and build its own transport aircraft, along with Russia and the US.

The Russian-Ukrainian Antonov-124 Ruslan is officially the world’s largest transport aircraft, with a payload nearly twice that of the Y-20 but it is out of production and work on upgrading the existing fleet has been frozen since 2014 due to tensions between Moscow and Kiev, according to press reports.

The rollout of the Y-20 takes place amid a rethink of military strategy by China, which sees itself gradually taking on missions farther from its borders. In November China announced the establishment of its first foreign military base, in Djibouti, as a hub to resupply the more than 2,000 Chinese troops taking part in African peacekeeping operations as well as Chinese anti-piracy patrols in the Indian Ocean.

A new counter-terrorism law adopted by Beijing this year allows China to station troops abroad for the first time to participate in counter-terrorism operations.

Last year China’s defence ministry released a white paper on strategy that emphasised the evolution of the country’s security needs away from simple territorial defence towards an offensive capacity overseas.

(Source : next.ft.com)

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