China Deploys All Three Aircraft Carriers to Sea Simultaneously for the First Time
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy has for the first time deployed all three of its aircraft carriers, the warships Liaoning, Shandong and Fujian, to sea simultaneously.
The Liaoning was at time time operating in the Philippine Sea, and the Shandong off Hainan Island in Southern China, with both of the 65,000 ton vessels leading full carrier groups with four or more destroyers and other combat and supporting ships.
The Fujian, which is not yet in service, was meanwhile conducting its fourth set of sea trials, after having made its eight day maiden sea trial from May 1, followed by a 20 day sea trial from May 23, and a 25 day sea trial from July 3.
The Liaoning and Shandong have notably both been deployed in the Western Pacific three times in the past three months. All three ship classes are conventionally powered and require only low levels of maintenance, which has contributed to their ability to maintain very high availability rates.
The three carriers are all expected to see their capabilities improved considerably with the deployment of more capable classes of fighters, namely the J-15B and FC-31, the latter which is thought to have recently been tested onboard the Liaoning.
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| J-15 Lands on Aircraft Carrier Liaoning |
The Liaoning and Shandong have intensified operations considerably from 2021, after official sources highlighted in May that year that this would occur. The two carriers launched their first major joint exercises in the Pacific in December that year.
The Liaoning in May 2022 launched over 100 sorties near Okinawa which is other leading host of American military facilities in the region, and eight months later January 2023 set a record of 320 sorties in over 15 days in another operation.
Subsequently in April that year the Shandong was deployed for exercises near U.S. bases on Guam, where it set a new record for the intensity of sorties launched from onboard at approximately 210 sorties, including 140 by its J-15 fighters, in under a week.
Both carriers are based on the Soviet Kuznetsov Class design, but are significantly more capable than the third ship built based on the design the Admiral Kuznetsov which serves in the Russian Navy which has much older electronics and propulsion systems.
The Shandong benefits from particularly extensive modifications with a much larger hangar area, 10 percent smaller island, and extended sponsons which allow it to accomodate up to eight more aircraft.
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| Chinese Aircraft Carrier Fujian |
China’s third carrier the Fujian is of an entirely different class, and is a supercarrier with a flat deck, catapult launch system and the ability to deploy close to twice as many fighters and a much wider range of support aircraft including airborne early warning and control ‘flying radar’ platforms like the KJ-600. Its ability to launch and recover several aircraft simultaneously facilitates far more intensive sorties than the Liaoning or Shandong are capable of.
The aircraft’s electromagnetic catapult launch system is unique to the Fujian and the U.S. Navy’s Gerald Ford Class supercarriers, and allows these ships to launch ships with very high efficiency and with much higher weights - and thus higher fuel and weapons loads.
It remains uncertain whether the Fujian will be the first ship of its class, or whether just one of the ships will be built before shipbuilders move on to a future supercarrier class. A successor may be larger and nuclear powered, although it remains possible that a decision on the next carrier design has not yet been made.
At 85,000 tons, the Fujian is by far the largest carrier class outside the U.S. Navy, although still smaller than the U.S. Navy’s 100,000 ton Nimitz Class and Gerald Ford Class ships. China depends far less heavily on aircraft carriers for its defence, as its armed forces are not heavily oriented to projected power abroad as most Western militaries are. The People’s Liberation Army is instead heavily focused on preparations for operations in the near abroad in East Asia, with leading potential hotspots all remaining in range of its land based fighters.
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