Su-33 + Beidou

I thought I'd share some interesting news coming out this week.

The first one is this Jane's Article. Basically, this is sort of a follow-up on the story from 2006. I've actually first heard of the negotiations starting in 2005 after Peace Mission 2005. It's been about 3 years since the negotiation first started, so many people might wonder why it hasn't progressed any further. Part of the reason is that there was a weapons freeze by China toward Russia after the IL-76 debacle. Another reason is that negotiations between China and Russia always takes a long time. For me, I think the real reason is that China's indigenous project to navalize flankers has not advanced as fast as it would like and PLAN would like a comparatively mature platform like su-33 to start training its new naval pilots. Using a brand new naval fighter on a brand new aircraft carrier with no previous carrier operations experience does not give a lot of confidence to a lot of people. By bringing in the Russians on this deal, they might also be willing to teach China some carrier operations. I think this deal is going to stop at 14, because the indigenous naval flanker project is not going to be abandoned. If they get 50 flankers, it pretty much would cover the first 2 carriers and remove the need for a 4th generation naval fighter.

I also read an interesting article this week from China. If you can read Chinese, you can try this link. It basically says that China will launch 12 new satellites for the Beidou navigation system in and around 2009. It will hope to provide full service to China and surrounding area by 2010. I'm not too sure what the "surrounding area" is referring to because we've already seen everything that Chinese military uses are equipped with Beidou despite the fact that only 5 satellites are up in the sky. The goal is to eventually have over 30 satellites.