Many of the U.S. military's operations in the Indo-Pacific region are completely different from those in the Middle East, and in addition to the need for more long-range attacks, the U.S. faces more high-end adversaries than armed groups in the Middle East. In recent years, the United States has also shown that the number of sorties of fighters in the Indo-Pacific region is low, resulting in a low number of sorties, because the mission of the Indo-Pacific is more complex, and the United States has repeatedly mobilized fighters from the mainland to deploy to the US military base in Japan. Recently, the United States dispatched a C-130 transport plane from Texas to Guam, stopping in Hawaii for a fairly short period of time, and the flight time of this C-130 transport plane reached 26 hours.
According to the U.S. Air Force, the mission test was to test the C-130 transport aircraft's extreme endurance and allow the C-130 transport aircraft to make as long a flight as possible after the fuel tank is full. In order to meet the current demand for use in the Indo-Pacific region, in addition to allowing a large number of fighters to fly to the limit, the United States will also require many pilots to practice ground hot refueling for their aircraft, and this hot refueling is also to shorten the fuel replenishment time of the aircraft after the technical stop. Nowadays, the C-130 tactical transport aircraft has completed a flight of up to 26 hours, of course, China's Y-9 transport aircraft does not have such strength. The Y-9 transport aircraft is not capable of completing the aerial refueling mission, but the Air Police-500 early warning aircraft developed based on the Y-9 platform has now added an air refueling probe, which can complete such long-endurance flights with the cooperation of another 20 air tankers.
Take the lead in the Air Police-500 early warning aircraft to be modified for air fueling, rather than the Y-9 transport aircraft, which is also because the current Y-9 does not bear such a long-endurance mission, and the early warning aircraft needs to patrol in the air for a long time, and complete the intelligence data collection of the designated airspace, and command a large number of fighters to fight, so the Air Police-500 early warning aircraft has very high requirements for air supremacy. With the cooperation of the YF-20 air tanker, the Air Police-500 AWACS aircraft is fully capable of completing long-endurance flights, but if it wants to fly for 26 hours, the Air Police-500 AWACS aircraft needs to carry more crew members.
At present, the Air Police-500 early warning aircraft has been equipped with the air force and naval aviation, and is also responsible for long-term patrols over the South China Sea. It has been reported that the Air Police-500 early warning aircraft has been deployed at some islands and reefs in the South China Sea, and the air situation over the South China Sea is very complicated, and the Air Police-500 early warning aircraft also needs to carry out long-endurance patrols, and with the Tank-20 air tanker and the Air Police-500 refueling capacity, the future Air Police-500 early warning aircraft can also be similar to the C-130 challenge to the ultimate time test.
The US military's C-130 transport plane flew for 26 hours, and it did not set a record for the longest flight hour of a C-130 transport plane; according to the information obtained by the War Research Institute, the US military's AC-130 air gunboat attack plane had set a 36-hour flight record, when the C-130 transport plane took off from Florida in the United States and flew all the way to the Daegu Air Base in South Korea, during which it carried out as many as seven in-flight refueling operations and took 36 hours. In fact, it does not take such a long time to fly from Florida to Daegu, South Korea, and the C-130's delay is mainly due to the fact that the C-130 is equipped with four turboprop engines, and the slow flight speed caused by the turboprop engines makes the C-130 take longer than a jet to complete such a mission. Text/Iris