A ship-borne aircraft regiment of the PLA Navy took drastic measures to reform those training methods and approaches out of keeping with future battles, through which its combat power has been greatly boosted.
During the training reform, the regiment insisted on letting its troops travel thousands of miles each year to different airports along the costal defense line with the aim to improve their emergency mobile fighting capability in long range raid operation. The regiment also made hard efforts to drill offensive and defensive skills at different strange air spaces and sea areas, and achieved more than 10 firsts in China's naval history, such as the first to hit deep sea targets, the first for three-helicopter formation to land on small-size landing ships, etc.
Ship-borne aircraft training cannot be done without naval vessels, and at the same time, the time provided by naval vessels to assist the ship-borne aircraft training is limited. In view of this, the regiment made use of various opportunities, such as drills and foreign visits, to turn passive support into active coordination in its training with focus on tactical subjects, realizing the integration between warships and ship-borne helicopters. Through practice, the regiment had explored a training method, which has optimized training procedures, simplified relations of coordination, expanded the training contents and improved training efficiency. All these have turned the ship-borne aircraft into real "air and maritime hunters."
Through systematical analysis and research on local warfare, the regiment decided to readjust its training plans to carry out deep-sea flying trainings at night.
This is not only an unprecedented breakthrough in China's ship-borne aircraft training history, but also a risk challenge to overstep the training outline. The leaders of the regiment led the scientific research team to carry out scientific appraisal for every link in flying deep-sea areas and night landing, and on this basis, to conduct mock drill repeatedly, and formulated many solutions for handling emergency situation at night, such as single aircraft landing, double aircraft landing or aircraft formation landing at moonlight night, starry nigh or pitch-dark night. Through its persistent efforts, it has made breakthrough one after another and achieved leapfrog development in technology, tactics and in academic field, and trained large number of skillful "air and maritime hunters."
At present, the regiment has developed a batch of new fighting methods, such as joint mobile anti-submarine operation, submarine hunting in escort mission, and realized the leapfrog development from bank-based operation to ship-borne operation, from offshore waters to deep sea, from carrying out general transport and rescue mission to implement maritime fighting tasks.
By Wu Ruihu, Yao Yan and Deng Shuming
(Mar.18, PLA Daily)
