China is building a drone aircraft carrier

Hidden in a shipyard on the Yangtze, far from the big shipyards of Shanghai, is a new aircraft carrier . It is China's fourth, a ship whose mere existence has never been reported before. Only China can build an aircraft carrier in relative secrecy.

This ship, launched in December 2022, but not reported until now, is surrounded by mystery and appears to have very particular characteristics. Naval News, together with J. Michael Dahm, Senior Resident Fellow at the Mitchell Institute, have analyzed it and results are very interesting.

Mysterious drone aircraft carrier

The world knows China's first three aircraft carriers; the largest and most capable, the Type-003 Fujian, is currently undergoing sea trials. This new aircraft carrier is very different. It could become the first aircraft carrier dedicated specifically to launching fixed-wing drones.

The design is smaller than regular aircraft carriers, with a flight deck about a third as long and half as wide as a U.S. Navy or Chinese Navy supercarrier. For comparison, it is slightly shorter but wider than a World War II escort carrier.

It would be possible to operate with fixed-wing aircraft, but the straight deck layout, without an angled deck, would be anachronistic, not allowing planes to take off and land at the same time. There also doesn't appear to be space for a typical aircraft hangar, so the number of aircraft would be very limited. So it doesn't make sense as a conventional aircraft carrier, but it makes sense as a drone carrier.

China certainly has drones with folding wings that would lend themselves to use from aircraft carriers. The HK5000Q fixed-wing reconnaissance drone would have the necessary features for use from an all-deck vessel

Drones are a growing part of naval warfare, as revealed by the conflict in Ukraine. Major navies are already testing them from regular aircraft carriers. And some navies, notably Iran and Turkey, are working on plans for 'drone aircraft carriers'.

Ship analysis

It is immediately apparent that this is, by and large, an aircraft carrier of some kind. It has a marked gap along the left side, with an island superstructure on the right side.

Other than that, it's unusual in every way. The hull is a widely spaced catamaran. Although catamarans are often featured in aircraft carrier designs because they allow for a large deck area, no one has ever built one before. Furthermore, analysis of satellite images shows that the flight deck is very low. It seems unlikely that there is a hangar deck below the flight deck. If there is, its ceiling is very low. Therefore, it does not appear designed to support high-tempo or sustained flight operations, if only for normal aircraft. For a small drone, maybe yes.

The flight deck is wide enough to comfortably operate planes or drones with a wingspan of about 20 meters (65 feet), such as the Chinese equivalents of the Predator drone.

However, the mere existence of a flight deck suggests that aircraft intend to land on it. A catapult or launch rail of some kind would be sufficient for launch, if recovery was not necessary.

China is known to have already tested carrier-based fixed-wing UAVs, with at least two different models carried aboard the aircraft carrier Shandong and captured in a photograph

Potential roles for this vessel

J. Michael Dahm notes that the shipyard where it is built, Jiangsu Dayang Marine, has already built ships that simulated enemy vessels for PLAN exercises. China has an extensive program of simulating Western and Western-oriented navies in its weapons testing program. Its anti-ship ballistic missiles are tested on full-scale templates of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.

Several high-tech target barges and two large drone motherships have already been built at this shipyard. All of these ships act as opposition forces during training, a role known as the 'Electronic Blue Force'. So it is possible that this ship is also designed to support this mission.

If the new vessel is intended to support large fixed-wing UAVs at sea, as its design suggests, then the question arises of who or what it is intended to simulate. As we noted, this is the world's first drone aircraft carrier, so it doesn't mimic any known Western ships. Such drones could be operated more economically from the ground. A second possibility is that it is a type of experimental platform that will test and develop drone operations at sea.

It remains to be seen whether it is intended for Blue Force simulation or pure research and development. Likewise, we wonder whether this is an official PLAN program or a speculative commercial project. The new drone aircraft carrier remains a bit of a mystery. Watch this space.

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The article China is building a drone aircraft carrier comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-cina-sta-costruendo-una-portaerei-per-droni/ on Wed, 15 May 2024 15:29:35 +0000.