30th January 2007
by Dr Carlo Kopp

(Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2006)

Basing infrastructure is a vital prerequisite for air operations. Runways, dispersal areas, fuel infrastructure, resupply pipleines for fuel replenishment, munitions storage all contribute to the effectiveness of a military air base. Base hardening and facilities dispersal in turn contribute to the survivability of the base.

The PLA has the most extensive and well developed basing infrastructure in Asia, and it competes in numbers with the former Soviet and US basing infrastructures. While many bases are legacy sites from the Cold War, a significant proportion of these have been subjected to extensive upgrades for dual civil-military use, retaining revetments and taxiways but gaining a runway rated for airliners rather than fighters, and a civil terminal facility. Most PLA-AF and PLA-N bases use extensive networks of dispersal revetments, and a 13 or more are 'superhardened' using large squadron or regiment sized underground hangars, tunnelled into hillsides.

During the Cold War period the PLA constructed much of the air base infrastructure along an arc from Mongolia across the northern provinces and down the coastal arc to the Vietnamese border. This was a byproduct of the strategic imperative to defend against the Soviet threat, and pre-Nixon, the perceived US threat in the Far East.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the PLA's imperatives have shifted, resulting in a large scale effort to construct dual use and military airfields across the Tibetan Plateau and the Western provinces, spanning the Chengdu and Lanzhou MRs [Tibet proper falls across the boundaries of these two MRs]. This effort has been paralleled by the construction of airfields in Chengdu MR, north of Burma, and inside Burma under the umbrella of military aid. The specific strategic aims are containment of India in the West, and the 'Second Island Chain' strategy in the Southern and Eastern provinces.

This reference page catalogues over 200 military and dual use airfields. It includes Google Earth KMZ files for air bases and civil airports where the identity of the base can be established with some confidence. As all data is open source, APA cannot guarantee that the data is comprehensive or up to date in every instance. The site will be updated as more open source data and high resolution imagery becomes available.

Notes and Abbreviations:

1. AB - Air Base.
2. Int - International Airport.
3. AFLD - Airfield.
4. APT - Airport.
5. Civil - refers to airfields which are dual use or civil (available for military use in contingency).
6. PLAN - PLA Naval Air Arm basing; all other military sites assumed to be PLA-AF.
7. FA - Flight Academy.
8. FD - Fighter Division.
9. GAD - Ground Attack Division.
10. F/GAD - Fighter Ground Attack Division.
11. BD - Bomber Division.
12. TD - Transport Division.
13. RWY - Runway Length in [ft].
14. CTA - Concrete Tarmac Area; an unprotected paved parking area, sometimes arranged as parking bays.
    
15. RVT - Revetment; a parking area usually protected by a berm, capable of accommodating 1 to 3 aircraft.
16. CVR - Lightweight sheetmetal 'carport' or semicylindrical parking cover.
17. HAS - Hardened Aircraft Shelter; concrete bomb resistant shelters.
18. UGH - Under Ground Hangar; typically tunnelled into a hillside.
19. LoRes - Image resolution too low to assess detail with confidence.
    

Resources:

Details of aircraft types may be found under these links:

Air Power Australia - January 2007 - Sukhoi Flankers - The Shifting Balance of Regional Air Power

Air Power Australia - January 2007 - Sukhoi Su-34 Fullback

Air Power Australia - January 2007 - Chengdu J-10 Fighter

Air Power Australia - January 2007 - Xian H-6 Badger

Air Power Australia - January 2007 - PLA-AF/PLA-N Legacy Fighters

Office of the Secretary of Defense -   Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2006

PLA-AF/PLAN-AF Air Divisional Structure

In broad terms a PLA-AF/PLAN-AF Air Regiment is comparable to an RAF/RAAF style Wing, with about half the strength of a USAF Wing.