So, it is not at all surprising that the PLAN leadership have, since the 1970s, planned for the eventual acquisition of an aircraft carrier capability within the Chinese fleet. It has been a long and sometimes arduous and occasionally highly secretive road to get the ships into service for the Chinese.
When the Royal Australian Navy decommissioned the last of its conventional aircraft carriers HMAS Melbourne, China was interested in obtaining the ship. Despite HMAS Melbourne having been built at the end of the Second World War and possessing some quite dated technology, enough remained aboard for the Chinese to analyse and assess what was necessary for future developments. The Australian aircraft carrier was acquired principally for scrapping by the China United Shipbuilding Company and was towed to China to be broken up arriving on 13 June 1985. The Royal Australian Navy had prior to the ship’s departure from Australian waters stripped her of everything that they deemed was of any future use such as electronics. Furthermore, they welded her rudders fixed so that the Chinese could not reactivate the ship in a warfighting role for the PLAN. What the Australian’s did not anticipate was that Chinese engineers could make good use of the steam catapults, arresting gear and mirror landing sights that were left aboard the former HMAS Melbourne.
Led by Rear Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong, a staff member at the Chinese National Defence College, the People’s Liberation Army Navy spent many months picking through the decommissioned ship steam catapult system and in April 1987 a J-8IIG aircraft piloted by Li Guoqiang a pilot for the Chinese Air Force (PLANAF) used the replica to conduct a series of launch and landings trials. Experience gained from these trials was used by engineers in designing the Shenyang J-15 strike aircraft that is today being flown from the decks of the Chinese operational aircraft carriers.
