The most secretive air force in the world, the Chinese air force ( PLAAF), is hindered by embarrasin

[Disotrtion]

[QUOTE]The Chinese Air Force plane drifted past a city and seemed to float, like a leaf, before exploding onto a mudflat where the Shandong peninsula juts out into the Yellow Sea. "It was floating, floating, floating then BANG, suddenly hit the ground," says a witness, according to video footage of the smoking wreckage on March 31 that was anonymously uploaded on the Chinese version of YouTube.
The huge plume of black smoke, still billowing from the wreckage 20 minutes after it exploded, suggests the tanks were full and the accident occurred not long after takeoff, probably from Jinan, the provincial capital.
Perhaps there had been a fuel blockage on one of the external wing tanks, leading to a weight imbalance that contributed to the Soviet-made Su-27 20 entering a flat spin before descending like a kite to earth, according to retired and serving Air Force officers.
The presence of what appear to be ejector seats just meters from the wreck suggests the two airmen died unnecessarily, because they failed to eject until it was too late. Whatever the case, the names of Yu Liang, 33, and Wu Yongming, 36, will be added to the 1,747 inscribed on the Heroes-and-Martyrs Wall at Beijing's Chinese Aviation Museum.

Crashes happen, even to the United States. But for professional military watchers, the more they see inside one of the world's most secretive air forces, it seems, the less they are impressed with the Chinese military's aerial wing.
Pilots are neither trusted nor properly trained. Drills are regimented, centrally controlled, and divorced from realistic combat conditions. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has nearly 2,000 thousand planes, compared with a little over 3,000 for the U.S. Armed Forces, but only a fraction of the peace-time accident rate, suggesting pilots are not spending sufficient time in the air or training under pressure.
While Chinese military enthusiasts saw the Shandong crash as an embarrassing setback, professionals saw it as a small sign that the PLA Air Force might be beginning to take the risks required to develop human "software" to match its expensive hardware and compete with their American, Taiwanese, or Japanese counterparts. "They've got to take risks," says Robert Rubel, a graduate of the U.S. Navy's "Top Gun" academy and now dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. "I've lost control of every airplane I've ever tried to fly."

The PLA's highest-profile challenge is to operate its newly revamped Ukrainian aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, with indigenously produced planes fitted with reverse-engineered Soviet technology, and fulfill China's ambitions to project military power offshore.
Last week, the Liaoning's captain, Zhang Zheng, and Rear Admiral Song Xue briefed defense attachés in Beijing and confirmed an ambition to build bigger carriers with greater capabilities. They also admitted to having only 12 trained pilots for the J-15 fighters they plan to deploy, according to sources who were present, suggesting it may be decades before Chinese carriers are operating effectively at sea.
"They've got to learn to operate on cloudy no-moon nights, where there is no horizon, and to land on a deck that's pitching 10, 12 feet," says Rubel, of the U.S. Naval War College. Even more crucial, he says, is developing the systems and culture to learn from inevitable mistakes.
The U.S. Navy lost a staggering 13,000 aircraft and 9,000 air crew in the four decades after World War II, mostly due to accidents, not enemy fire, as its pilots adjusted to the lethal combination of jet engines and aircraft carriers. Rubel says that much of those losses were due to a U.S. Navy culture where ship captains were naturally conditioned to survive on their wits at sea, and the early navy aviators threw caution to the wind because the chance of death was so high. Both the U.S. Air Force and the Navy established safety centers and procedures. The accident rate plummeted in the Air Force, with its centralized structure and standardized practices, but kept rising in the Navy. It didn't fully settle down until 1983, when Top Gun was made.
China's learning curve may be even steeper. The challenge of operating battle groups and jet-powered air wings at sea, which took four decades to overcome in the U.S. Navy, is multiplied in a Chinese political system where politics explicitly trumps professionalism in all facets of organized life and there is no transparency or independent institutions to monitor and regulate the game.
Chinese officers admit they have a long way to go, but say that risk tolerance is rising under tougher demands from the new commander-in-chief, Xi Jinping. "Accidents are the price that must be paid to improve combat capability," said Air Force Senior Colonel Dai Xu. "This is the price for scientific progress." [/QUOTE]
[URL="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/30/can_china_s_top_guns_fly_pla_air_force?page=0,2"]
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/30/can_china_s_top_guns_fly_pla_air_force?page=0,2[/URL]

[Reds]

First, that's a giant unreadable block of text.

Second, it looks like you put entire article into that. You'll be banned for that if you don't adjust it to be brief snippets soon.

[Disotrtion]

[QUOTE=Reds;40498182]First, that's a giant unreadable block of text.

Second, it looks like you put entire article into that. You'll be banned for that if you don't adjust it to be brief snippets soon.[/QUOTE]
There's a pay wall, I didn't copy the entire article, and I already edited it for size, but now I just edited it further.
I would bold stuff, but I avoid bolding portions of text because of potential bias.

[laserguided]

Give them time, they need to reverse engineer foreign pilots.

Also this is pretty interesting, estimated that there is only a decade or so before China's military budget overtakes the US military budget.

[t]http://iissvoicesblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/mb13-chinae28093us-defence-spending-projections.jpg[/t]

And by the way, its not the most secretive air force in the world, its the largest most secretive air force in the world.