ISLAMABAD – PAF has announced plans for facility currently underconstruction which will allow Pakistan to completely overhaul 20 JF 17fighter aircraft in 2020.
The first JF-17 Thunder multirole combat aircraft overhauled in Pakistanwas rolled out during a ceremony held on 26 September at the PakistanAeronautical Complex (PAC) Kamra. The move comes nearly 10 years after thefirst JF-17, which was jointly developed by China and Pakistan, rolled offthe production line there.
The Pakistan Air Force (PAF’s) Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief MarshalMujahid Anwar Khan, said during the ceremony: “We are living in atechnology-intensive world, where self-reliance and indigenisation are keyto effectively addressing modern challenges. [The] PAF has beenrelentlessly pursuing these goals and has now achieved this remarkablecapability”.
Work on the JF-17 maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO) project has beenunder way since 2017. The chief engineer of JF-17 MRO, a wing commander whodid not want to be named, had told *Jane’s* in April, “We have beenoverhauling Chinese aircraft for the past few decades, so we took theinitiative and developed our own JF-17 overhaul facility here in theAircraft Repair Factory [ARF].”
“We developed the overhaul package, but to have it validated by the Chinesewe sent two, effectively pattern aircraft to Changsha, in China during2017,” he added. Changsha is the 5712 Aircraft Industry Co., which operatesunder state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC).
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Around the same time, the ARF started working on two JF-17s, in tandem withthe two aircraft in China, with the wing commander stressing that “wecarried out all the work here ourselves using our own procedures”.
The two jets overhauled in China were back at PAC Kamra by April, when theARF was working on a third aircraft. There are plans for five more aircraftto be overhauled at the factory in 2019, and a new hangar currently underconstruction will open next year, allowing 20 aircraft to be overhauled in2020.
