C919 KJ-3000 AEW

Air Police 2000 is a large-scale early warning aircraft of the Chinese Air Force. It has been in service for more than ten years. From the perspective of equipment replacement, a new generation of domestic large-scale early-warning aircraft should already be under development. Police 3000 named.

The early warning aircraft is actually a combination of platform + radar. Of course, the Air Police 3000 platform is not the same as the Air Police 2000, only the Il 76 option. Today, China ’s military transport 20 or civilian C919 are all available platforms for Air Police 3000.

Take Yun 20 as an example. It is a large 200-ton military transport aircraft. It can undoubtedly meet the needs of deploying more equipment and personnel. However, if you compare large passenger aircraft from abroad, you may find that it may still have some temporarily unsatisfactory places. Yes, it has a large load capacity of about 50 tons. When converted to an early warning aircraft, such a large aircraft is not actually needed. Load; if the design is not improved, the weight of the entire structure designed according to the 50-ton load requirement will be a large part of the excess, these excess weight will seriously eat oil, affecting sailing hours.

In contrast, the domestic commercial large aircraft C919, the situation is different. Its overall performance is equivalent to that of Boeing-737. The maximum take-off weight is about 100 tons. In fact, it is a medium-sized aircraft. It has opened some distance from Yun-20 in tonnage. But is the aircraft platform "smaller" than Yun 20 necessarily a disadvantage?

With the increasing miniaturization of modern electronic technology equipment, it is no longer necessary to increase the radar detection power by increasing the antenna area. According to public reports, Academician Wang Xiaomo, the father of China ’s early warning aircraft, and his team have successfully conquered the so-called digital array radar technology.

In order to generate a sufficiently high frequency transmission signal, the traditional active phased array radar must perform frequency conversion step by step, with many circuits, high complexity and relatively low reliability; while digital radar directly generates a certain number directly by digital methods. Transmitting signals at frequency eliminates the need for multi-level complex circuits, which greatly reduces weight and volume. In other words, "smaller" aircraft now equipped with "smaller" antennas may not necessarily be less powerful than "bigger" aircrafts equipped with "bigger" antennas, that is, if the same is developed into early warning aircraft, the C919 and The Yun 20's radar power may be completely close, but the C919 is more economical because of its light weight.