In the past two days, the Y-20s of our army's strategic transport aircraft units, which have not made any major moves for a long time, have begun to be active again, and last week they carried out several rounds of reinforcements to the eastern coastal cities, and yesterday they were found from the FR24 platform that up to 6 Y-20s formed a large formation, stopped in Turkey, flew directly to Serbia in southeast Europe, and then flew back to China after a short stay, and many foreign aviation enthusiasts took a lot of photos along the way.
A simple calculation, from the mainland to Serbia one-way flight is almost 7,000 kilometers, this fast round trip is 14,000 flight miles, but also set a new record for the rapid round-trip operation of the Y-20 since its entry into service; of course, the new record is not only the flight mileage, but also the scale of application is also a new high, the last large-scale dispatch to foreign countries or last year's participation in international military competitions, Several Y-20s from two aviation divisions flew to a number of competition sites with the officers and men of our army to participate in the competition, demonstrating for the first time the long-range delivery capability of our army that has begun to take shape.
This record-setting single-wave long-distance transport mission illustrates another fact, that is, our army's current Y-20 fleet has indeed reached a very considerable scale; don't forget, in addition to sending these Y-20s to fly to Belgrade, our army now has another fleet that has been busy supporting a coastal city in the east these days, and these 6 transport planes flying to Europe. Judging from the tactical number, the same transport aviation corps of our army can easily take out 6 Y-20s from the same unit to carry out the task, and among the aircraft participating in the operation this time, the largest one has reached the 12th, which can also be regarded as a side display of the current rapid expansion of the Y-20 fleet size.
Judging from the scale of this Y-20 dispatch and the recent cooperation between China and Serbia, this large number of Y-20 should be shipped to Serbia what serbian troops ordered from the continental military system of large equipment, according to Serbian netizens should be an export version of the Red Flag-22 air defense system and Tschatha integrated UAV; usually this kind of heavy equipment export We will generally find Russia's 224 flying team or Volga Dnieper to lease their transport aircraft to use. But recently because Russian aircraft were banned from transit by the European Union, Serbia was surrounded by the European Union, so we sent our own large transport aircraft to deliver to the door, and by the way, we also tested the ability of our Y-20 to perform ultra-long-range delivery tasks.
If this is the case, then in fact, this kind of flight is actually quite valuable in actual combat, in the past, our army's Y-20 mission abroad was basically to transport people or transport masks and vaccines and other materials, and the transportation of this large-scale high-value heavy equipment is still the first time; in actual combat, the strategic transport aircraft to perform long-distance delivery tasks will of course not only deliver people, but to people and equipment to go together; there are still many differences between flight and light load under heavy loads, from loading and unloading organizations to flight plans to formation organizations in flight, which is a test. Our army's transport aircraft units can use this opportunity to train their own level, and when they really need to carry out strategic delivery with heavy equipment, they will naturally become familiar with it.
The President of Serbia recently stated that as a country surrounded by NATO, NATO does not allow civil aviation aircraft to transport Russian-made or mainland-made military equipment to Serbia through NATO airspace, obviously to choke the throat of Serbia's national defense capabilities and government capabilities in this way.
But this is also a kind of exercise for other emergency situations, from the earliest sending participants to Russia, heavy equipment to follow the railway, to this year's ultra-long-range rush to Tonga, and then to the current 6 swarms flying in unison to the Balkan Peninsula, the flight mileage is getting farther and farther, the scale of dispatch is getting bigger and bigger, the payload of the flight is also getting heavier and heavier and more and more practical, which is also a manifestation of the gradual enhancement of our military's strategic delivery capability, through this 6 Y-20 direct flights to Serbia to send heavy loads, we can completely say, Our army has initially possessed a heavy equipment and rapid response capability similar to that of the two major strategic air forces of the United States and Russia, which can allow troops to take their heavy equipment to any airborne plant within thousands of kilometers in a short period of time.
And in the rapid expansion of the strength of the people's air force, the most important thing is the natural production capacity, if you pay attention to the Y-20 production plant Xifei 172 open source satellite pictures in recent years should know that the production plant of Xifei in recent years has carried out a very many rounds of expansion work, not only near the runway of the new apron after several large-scale expansion, in the surrounding areas there are several large-scale plants built, of which the one was completed at the beginning of last year, visually can accommodate less than 10 Y-20 simultaneous production And now there is another production plant is being expanded, these expansions in the past decade have given the mainland an unprecedented large transport capacity, in 3-5 years the transport aircraft force to catch up with the level of the Russian air and space force; it is not a problem to carry out the russian army's rapid reloading into Kazakhstan.
Of course, the future things will be said in the future, but in any case, After all, the ultra-long-distance flight of our army's 14,000-kilometer round-trip Y-20 large formation is worth celebrating; after all, it has set many records in the history of our air force; whether it is the unprecedented number of dispatches of 6 aircraft or the quality of the long-distance flights carrying a large number of heavy equipment, it is unprecedented.