China Copied This Russian Jet Fighter (And It Has All Sorts of Problems) – YAHOO NEWS
The J-15 is a reverse engineered copy of a 1980’s vintage Russian SU-33. They need it to successfully use their “too small” aircraft carrier. The problem is that in order to work, the jet has to perform flawlessly and since it is a pirate copy that is typical of many pirate items from China, all too often it does not get enough speed (when what it can do should be perfectly predictable with such an item) and at the end of the ski jump it falls in the water rather than takes off.
Russia ridiculed China for not being innovative and making their own stuff and copying a Russian design, but there’s a problem with that statement – A majority of Russian tech was stolen from the United States, all the way back to the atomic bomb. Russians are not good in this regard either, and should not be talking about China ripping off designs.
Well, Iran is a step down from China having copied a jet that is much older than China’s copy, but I don’t think the Iranian copy crashes much. Rumor has it that at least it works.
h/t Djibouti Military Intelligence