China’s home-made amphibious aircraft AG600, the world’s largest such plane, makes its official debut in Zhuhai.

The aircraft, with a maximum takeoff weight of 53.5 tonnes and a maximum range of more than 5,000 kilometers,
can absorb 12 tonnes of water within 20 seconds, which is ideal for performing multiple operations
including forest fire fighting, over-water Search and Rescue, marine environment monitoring,
resource exploration, passenger and freight transportation and other operating tasks.

Its amphibious function makes it possible to take off from both land and water,
rescuing 50 people at most on water at one time.

Workers are currently assembling the fuselage of the world’s largest amphibious aircraft.
The AVIC General Aircraft Company has won 17 orders for the amphibious aircraft AG600,
including two at 2014 Zhuhai Air Show.

AVIC expected to deliver 60 AG600 amphibious aircraft in 15 years. The AVIC TA-600,
also known as AG-600, is a large amphibious flying boat that is being designed and built in China
by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC).

It looks like an Airbus A400 and a CL-415 had a child that neither wanted to keep.

Once again it appears that the Chinese (or any other communist state...ie USSR) lacks any originality. But heck, it cost money for research and development so why not just steal someone else's design and change it a little bit to make a new product.

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=110013

The Japs' Shin Maywa was a derivative of the Martin Marlin, tho they added boundary layer control, a new wing and four turbines..
Famous in Vietnam as "Pig Boats"...
They long patrolled the pacific to Alaska wearing twenty nuke mines under each engines and flew ten feet off the deck to melt ice with the salt spray!


One wonder if the Chinese added this boundary layer control...a good idea would be to use TWO engines for the sucking power,
as the Shin's crashes were caused by the fifth engine flaming out at the wrong time, making the plane drop like a rock...

Get a load of the ground speed of that sucker...45 knots airspeed, less the wind...
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In_h3JjJxbo[/youtube]

When I visited the main sea base at Iwakuni, they had removed the scoops and the water dump system, so they
had no water bombing capability when earthquake struck Kobe a few years later and the whole city was burning.
Same disaster at the tsunami struck nuclear station a few years ago, had to use helicopters...

Shinn Maywa industries...guess what's in the backyard, the Martin Marlin!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh8mn0DeKSs

fish4life wrote:It looks like an Airbus A400 and a CL-415 had a child that neither wanted to keep.

Kind of looks more like a Dash 7 and a Grumman Goose's illegitimate child?

Looks like a cool plane on the first pass. Some of my favorite things come from China, as did my iPhone, I'm sure the plane will be fine.

as long as it doesn't operate anywhere near bridges...

That's a pretty serious looking chine/spray rail/ whatever that is on the bow. I'd love to know what the idea behind all the little vents and strange stepped area aft of the spray rail. Looks pretty cool, I think.

I don't think it looks much like the Japanese one- well, maybe superficially.

What colour will the finished ones be painted ?

There was a company in Canada buying and trying to lease all sorts of planes to train the pi,ots for this plane.

Anybody know the status of that?

ITPS Canada (International Test Pilot School) in London did the training for the Chinese test pilots for the AG600 program. Completed last year, with the final 60 hrs training on the Martin Mars.