Dragon Boat: China’s New Type 003 Super Carrier Could Launch as Soon as Friday - Reports

Following war games earlier this month that pushed the limits of its carrier battle group, analysts said China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) was preparing for the arrival of the Type 003 aircraft carrier, as well as showing nearby US and Japanese warships what it can do.

China’s new Type 003 aircraft carrier could make its debut during the Dragon Boat Festival on Friday, according to a military source who spoke with the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Several circumstances point to a likely launch at that time, including a Maritime Safety Administration warning outside the dock at Shanghai’s Jiangnan shipyard, where the carrier is being built in a dry dock, in order to remove a piece of another vessel that’s blocking the Type 003 from the sea, the paper said.

Friday, the day of China’s nautically-focused Dragon Boat Festival, would seem to be an ideal occasion for the new ship to hit the water.

The massive 85,000-ton warship will be the world’s largest not in US Navy service, larger even than the UK’s Queen Elizabeth-class carriers. Like the US’ Nimitz-class and Ford-class carriers, and France’s Charles de Gaulle, the Type 003 will use catapults to launch aircraft off its flight deck - a method that allows faster speeds and heavier loads than the bow ramps seen on China’s other carriers or the British ones.

In anticipation of the Type 003’s arrival, the PLAN has developed new aircraft that need its catapults to take off, such as the KJ-600 airborne early warning aircraft and a forthcoming stealth aircraft based on the FC-31 fifth-generation demonstrator aircraft. The J-15 Flying Shark fighters on China’s other carriers, Liaoning and Shandong, will also get a boost in performance thanks to the catapults.

The Type 003’s launch has been hotly anticipated for more than two years, and an online community has popped up around the regular photos snapped by overhead satellites or passengers on aircraft flying near the shipyard, showing the day-to-day progress in the massive warship’s assembly.

An early 2022 satellite image of China's Type 003 aircraft carrier, showing it to be near completion but work still being done on its three aircraft catapults.

© Google Earth

However, once it’s in the water, it will still take several years for other equipment to be installed and for the ship’s many new systems to be fully tested, fine-tuned, and mastered by a new crew. Because the Type 003 is a new class of ship, that process is likely to take longer.

The Type 003 was laid down in 2018, when the Shandong, the first carrier built from the keel-up in China, was not yet commissioned. Since then, the PLAN has launched three Type 075 amphibious assault ships, a type of helicopter carrier that can also deploy amphibious forces, meaning that when the Type 003 hits the water, China won’t have three carriers, but six. However, without a vertical takeoff fighter like the US’ F-35B or UK’s Harrier Jump Jet, the Type 075s won’t pack quite the same punch.

The PLAN has rapidly expanded and modernized in recent years, adding other advanced warships like its Type 055 guided-missile cruisers as well. One of the Type 055s accompanied Liaoning during recent multi-week drills in the Philippine Sea earlier this month, which pushed the limits of the PLAN’s logistics as the Liaoning ran round-the-clock air drills. Nearby, Japanese warships accompanied a US carrier battle group in their own drills, which observers said provided the PLAN with “perfect practice partners.”

The PLA’s Eastern Theater Command also characterized the drills as a warning to “Taiwan independence forces” being encouraged by the United States.