The Drones Keep on Coming

Shenyang J-6 Drone

Shenyang J-6

My Daily Kona has a story about how Red China is converting their fleet of aging J-6 fighter aircraft into drones. They are old and obsolete but still serviceable which means they could make excellent attack drones. China has a several airbases that are just a stone's throw from Taiwan and since the J-6 is capable of Mach 1.3 it would take it about 6 minutes to cross the 100 mile wide Taiwan Strait.

Chinese Airbases near Taiwan

China has several thousand of J-6 aircraft. Should they convert them all to drones and use them to attack Taiwan, Taiwan would have its work cut out trying to shoot them all down. Anti-aircraft missiles would be the weapon of choice. Conventional anti-aircraft guns have a hard time against supersonic aircraft.

Of course China has got its work cut out converting these aircraft into drones, and then there's the little matter of making them work. Who knows what kind of problems they are going to run into, especially if they try to get them to fly supersonic. I don't know that anyone is building supersonic drones. Yet.

My Daily Kona lists five Chinese air bases that are near the strait. I couldn't find all of them. Wikipedia has a list of about 170 Chinese air bases. I picked five that sort of matched Kona's list and plotted them on a Google Map.