Monday, February 27, 2012

New PLAAF regiments

Over the past year, we really haven't seen much movement on the J-10 front. J-10B's prototype 1035 has been testing for a long time, but we've basically seen the same batch of J-10s in yellow primer conducting test flights out of CAC. The batch 06 was first sighted in late 2010 and then all the way through 2011. Finally, we are seeing this batch of J-10s getting delivered. Most recently, we see some J-10S painted in PLAAF with serial number 20x6x ready to join service in the 15th division at Datong.

So, it would seem like this is the last J-10A/S regiment. Scramble has also updated this 43rd regiment of 15th division to be a J-10 regiment.

At the same time, we've also identified 2 new JH-7A regiments in service with PLAAF. First of all, the 28th division seems to be getting a second regiment. There is a new JH-7A with the serial number 31098 showing up recently. According to Scramble, this new regiment (the 84th regiment) started to be replaced with JH-7A from late 2011. At the same time, a new JH-7A regiment seems to have been established in the 110th Air Brigade (4xx8x, where xxx is 050-099). This Air Brigade was formerly of the 37th division. It seems like PLAAF is doing some experimentation with orbat recently and the 37th division became 3 air brigades. This would also include the J-11B/S serving under the 111th Air Brigade. From what I can tell, 37th division is the only one that has been transformed this way in PLAAF thus far.

1 comment:

SINOGASS said...

What do you think about "China to buy 48 Su 35"? What do you think about the number or quantity? Thank you!