Important information was recently revealed by the head of the “Y-20 First Regiment” in an interview with CCTV, which made many Chinese military fans overjoyed, in which he talked about “Y-20 refueling aircraft” and “Y-20 early warning aircraft“.
After Y-20 tanker that has been put into test flight, the long-known project of Y-20 platform airborne early warning aircraft is finally been confirmed this time.
According to public papers published by Chinese leaders in the field of domestic early warning aircraft such as Lu Jun – chief engineer of the KJ-2000 project – in recent years, among the four capabilities of the next-generation early warning aircraft: high detection capability, high anti-interference capability, high identification capability, and high battlefield management capability, high detection capability of the fifth-generation stealth fighter aircraft is required to be over 360 kilometers.
Although early warning aircraft experts also believe that in the future, the early warning aircraft platform will continue to develop on platforms of all sizes, and small and medium-sized aircraft platforms will be focused, while unmanned early warning system will also become a major direction, advantages of a large-size early warning aircraft platform have never been neglected.
In fact, even before the Y-20 transport aircraft entered service, there had been rumors about the next-generation large-scale early warning aircraft program called KJ-3000, which would use Y-20 as a platform.
According to Zhen Chadian, a military analyst, the contemporary development of conformal antenna technology can better take advantage of the conformal antenna, which no longer needs to be compensated by significantly adjusting the aerodynamic shape of the carrier as in the past. There will be fewer restrictions on size, which helps to make full use of the body space to arrange larger radar antennas.
This is an appealing idea for the next-generation early warning aircraft which are supposed to be anti-stealth, like KJ-3000 AEW&C aircraft, as Chinese academician Wang Xiaomo, “the father of China’s early warning aircraft,” said, “The next-generation early warning aircraft should be given a higher goal, that is, to be ahead in all ways, and the Chinese will lead the new trend of early warning aircraft.”