“National Defense Military Morning Post” column of CCTV-7 recently reported news of a free air combat exercise between the J-10 and Su-30 fighters of a certain naval aviation brigade of the Chinese air force. In the free air battle, the red side J-10 and Su-30 mixed formation confront with the blue side J-10 formation.
In the confrontation, the red side’s J-10s were the first to detect information on the blue side’s targets and provided information on the altitude, speed, and position of the targets to their friendly Su-30s, which then attacked based on the information provided by the friendly aircraft.
The initial communication system specifications and standards between China’s homemade J-10 and Russia-made Su-30 are different and incompatible, but now they can achieve real-time “sharing” of target information. Obviously, the homemade data link of the same specification is installed, according to military journals Ordnance Science and Technology. And such data link is believed to have been used among J-20, J-16, and J-10C in another recent aircraft exercise.
In addition to the inter-aircraft data link, the Su-30 can now also mount China’s homemade PL-8 + PL-12 air-to-air missiles combined, which shows that it has also been using aviation data link, namely the aviation weapon data link.