The Su-27 was not born for carriers, so carrier-based aircraft such as the Su-33 / J-15 are not very friendly in terms of support, which greatly extends the support time.
Carrier-based aircraft generally need to come with their own collapsible boarding ladder to facilitate pilots to quickly board the aircraft cockpit, such as Super Hornet, Rafale, including the current F-35. The Super Hornet's side strip wings are very wide, and the foldable boarding ladder is set under the side strip wings, and the boarding ladder is supported on the fuselage through the support rod after being lowered, and then retracted into the inside of the side strip wing. The J-15 did not have its own boarding ladder, and the deck personnel were required to run with the movable boarding ladder, which greatly affected the efficiency.
In addition to the boarding ladder, the J-15 and the accompanying ground support equipment have many details that do not take into account the needs of boarding. Carrier-based aircraft need to be charged, nitrogenized, oxygenated. The charging port of the Super Hornet is set on the left side of the head, less than 1.9 meters above the ground, slightly above the head of the ground crew, who can open the cover and plug in the power cord.
The charging port of the J-15 continues the design of the Su-27, on the left side of the fuselage, on the side wall of the engine compartment between the main landing gear and the ventral fin, the height from the ground is about 1.5 meters, the ground crew needs to drag the charging cable to the tail, open the cover and plug in the power plug. The disadvantage of this design is that the personnel have to bend over and lower their heads to prevent their heads from hitting the trailing edge flaps or horizontal tail of the J-15. There is also a problem that in order to ensure the safety of charging operations, the tail of the J-15 cannot extend overboard, which will occupy a large deck working area.
The nitrogen-filled interfaces of the Super Hornet and J-15 are located in the nose of the machine, and the operation has no effect. The difference is that the nitrogen-filled vehicle on the US aircraft carrier is installed with 6 cylinders to form a bottle group, and the cylinders can be exchanged without affecting continuous operation. Our nitrogen-filled truck adopts an integral design, the shape is like a freezer, the cylinder inside is not removable, if the air pressure is insufficient, it needs to be pushed to the nitrogen production room to replenish, and the continuous operation capacity of the nitrogen-filled vehicle is reduced. At present, the number of J-15s that the Liaoning and Shandong ships can release at one time is not much, and there is no problem, but after the new catapult aircraft carrier is commissioned, the number of carrier-based aircraft has nearly doubled, and this nitrogen filling method is obviously not reasonable enough.
As for oxygenation, the liquid oxygen storage tank on the American aircraft carrier is installed on a simple tricycle, which is parked at the edge of the flight deck, and in case of emergency, the oxygen can be directly released to avoid explosion. The carrier-based aircraft is equipped with a small detachable liquid oxygen tank, with a capacity of about 8 liters, when used, the small removable liquid oxygen tank is filled with liquid oxygen, and then directly loaded on the aircraft, and then replaced with a new storage tank after use. The oxygenation method of the J-15 is the same as nitrogen filling, and a small oxygenating vehicle is used to oxygenate the aircraft through the pipeline, and the safety of this oxygenation mode is obviously not as good as the direct replacement of liquid oxygen tanks.
In the final analysis, it is still a matter of design, the Super Hornet is from an orthodox carrier-based aircraft, and the J-15 is a halfway out. Due to the problems of the original design of the J-15, the efficiency of refueling, inflating and hanging bombs on the aircraft carrier is very low, which requires more ground crew and wastes more deck space.
At present, the J-15 still needs to continue to serve for many years, and it is necessary to make targeted improvements to improve the efficiency of support. First of all, the landing gear was redesigned to reduce the stopping height by 20-30 cm to facilitate refueling and hanging bombs. Secondly, optimize the missile pylons, eliminate the 2 pylons under the intake tract and the folding wing segment pylons except for the wingtip pylons, and change the inner wing pylons to the kind of composite pylons, which can ensure the loading of at least one medium-range bomb and one combat bomb.
As for the change of charging, oxygenation, and nitrogen charging modes, the technical difficulty is not large, the real difficulty is to change the entire support system, which requires the coordination of multiple departments, and the difficulty of actual promotion is really great. On the contrary, it is our own carrier-based fourth-generation aircraft, which is designed with all aspects in mind, and many detours are spared, which is also the area where we have the smallest gap with the US military. In general, the ground support of aircraft carriers should pay special attention to man-machine interface and operability, and sometimes, details can determine success or failure.