According to Taiwan’s United Daily News on the 5th, Taiwan’s military held a “Spring Festival Strengthening Readiness Media Visit”, inviting the island’s media to visit the Taiwanese Air Force’s 4th Wing, with the “flight wing to strengthen combat readiness” as the background, showing F-16V emergency takeoff, “elephant walk” and other subjects, “to show the ability and determination of the Taiwanese Air Force to defend the airspace”, while also showing the F-16V equipped with the “joint helmet targeting system” for the first time at close range.
Especially noteworthy is that the interviewed Taiwanese pilots confirmed that the F-16V and PLA J-16 fighters “have a record of intercepting each other” after the “Phoenix Project” performance enhancement.
The report said that the major of Taiwan Air Force, Yan Xiang-sheng, who was responsible for demonstrating the “joint helmet targeting system”, said that he had piloted the F-16V fighter and intercepted the PLA J-16 fighter a month or two ago, “the CCP fighters frequently enters our air defense identification zone, each of the pilots of the four-coalition has this experience, each ascending training batch will be implemented to intercept, (we are) ‘experienced'”.
The Taiwanese media said that the PLA J-16 warplanes entered Taiwan’s so-called “air defense identification zone” in 2021, a total of 344 sorties, Yan Xiang Sheng also admitted that the PLA is sending more and more military aircraft sorties, the Fourth Wing will take emergency lift-off to send more troops to respond to the action.
The Chinese Ministry of National Defense spokesman Tan Kefei said a week ago that the actual number of aircraft sorties by the PLA would only be more, not less, than the number hyped by the DPP authorities.
This probably means that not all of the planes sent by the Chinese mainland were detected by Taiwan, which may include the J-20 stealth fighters or the J-16 fighters that were monitoring Taiwan’s F-16V from a distance.
Compared to the F-16V, the J-16 has an overall advantage in radar detection distance, hang time, and weapon load, and also has the longer-range “PL-15” air-to-air missile, so it is fully capable of winning an air battle beyond visual range. Even in close air combat, the J-16 has a good chance of gaining an advantage with the combination of the advanced PL-10 combat missile and helmet sights.
And according to China CCTV military report on January 6, in a flight training base of the Chinese Air Force, J-20, J-16 and other types of fighter planes took to the air in turn, to carry out different types of aircraft air combat confrontation, live-fire ground target training and other courses.
During the training, the two J-16 fighters and the two J-20 fighters constantly switched offensive and defensive roles as opponents and started a game in the air.