Recently, foreign media reported that public photos taken by Chinese commercial satellites showed images of The Indian city of Cochin, including the domestically built aircraft carrier VIKram, which has been docked in the shipyard in the city. The lines on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier are quite easy to see.
In the photos, the small and medium-sized aircraft carrier’s take-off point was extended almost to the stern and grazed directly into the carrier’s landing strip. This means that if an aircraft carrier cannot land and take off at the same time during a state of emergency, the Angle deck arrangement will be almost completely meaningless. It would be better to have a straight deck.
China’s commercial satellite! India’s indigenous aircraft carrier has been photographed, exposing a fatal flaw on its deck
Photo: China’s commercial satellite took this photo of India’s Cochin Shipyard.
Let’s take a closer look at the flight deck of the Indian carrier.
The Vikrant is a bevel deck similar to a straight deck. The bevel does not go out at a large Angle, nor is it wide. Due to its small displacement, even smaller than that of the Kyiv class carrier Vikramaditya, the flight deck layout is cramped and chaotic, even less pleasing to the eyes than the flight deck of our Type 075 amphibious assault ship.
Vikrant has two take-off runways and converges to the top of the jump deck.
I indicate with red circle, the latter is used in the heavy duty state, the former is used in the light load state. However, the two runways cannot be used at the same time and will still only be able to take off one by one, far less efficiently than a catapult-style aircraft carrier. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that both take-off lines are in the landing zone on the left side of the carrier.
What does that mean? No matter which runway is used, aircraft carriers will no longer be able to recover aircraft.
China’s commercial satellite! India’s indigenous aircraft carrier has been photographed, exposing a fatal flaw on its deck
Picture: In the red circle are two fighter take-off points, the front is used under light load and the back is used under heavy load.
Let’s compare the flight deck of vikramaditya, a second-hand aircraft carrier bought by India from Russia, with the decks of admiral Kuznetsov and Liaoning.
We can see that “liaoning province” and “admiral kuznetsov” takeoff runway is located in aircraft carrier on either side of the central axis, so even if the aircraft landing can not use the overloaded take-off point, but the light load take-off point can park air defense duty fighter, then mount the air-to-air missile of light load, such as su – 33 / fighters – 15 fighter planes to take off.
Although the size of Vikramaditya is small, it still separates the light-load take-off point from the landing runway and is close to the bridge. Although it has certain impact on landing, vikramaditya has the capability of landing and taking off at least theoretically.
China’s commercial satellite! India’s indigenous aircraft carrier has been photographed, exposing a fatal flaw on its deck
At the Indian-built Vikrant, the carrier’s tonnage has been further reduced to only 37,500 tons, and the deck space is too small to accommodate two separate runways on both sides, so it has to place both runways in the left landing area.
As a result, the carrier deck operation is further deteriorated, and its take-off and landing efficiency is even lower than the vertical/short takeoff and landing fighters used in the old carrier era!
To tell you the truth, the design of Indian aircraft carrier in this way is also very helpless. After all, with another 10,000 tons of displacement, there would be plenty of deck space. Even though the 30,000-ton hull couldn’t be built well in more than ten years, let alone a bigger hull!
No one can draw a 100,000-ton aircraft carrier on a drawing board, but considering India’s weak shipbuilding industry, Indian designers have nothing to lose.
China’s commercial satellite! India’s indigenous aircraft carrier has been photographed, exposing a fatal flaw on its deck
Photo: In the past, there were pictures of aircraft carrier deck, but there was no carrier deck marking.
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