China’s Fujian carrier just gave the world its first look at an electromagnetic catapult launching aircraft from its deck, a dramatic display of Beijing’s ambitions to field a supercarrier rivaling anything in the U.S. fleet. But one huge question could still sink its combat value: whether the catapult is reliable enough for sustained, high-tempo operations. The U.S. Navy’s own experience with similar technology has been marked by years of reliability shortfalls, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
Fujian’s Catapult Goes Public
State broadcaster CCTV aired footage that it said showed J-35 stealth fighters, J-15T jets, and a KJ-600 airborne radar aircraft launching from Fujian’s electromagnetic catapult for the first time. The release was carefully staged, with each aircraft type shown accelerating down the flight deck in quick succession, a visual meant to signal that the system can handle a full range of carrier-based aircraft, from heavy fighters to the radar planes that give a carrier group its long-range eyes. For Chinese audiences, the images reinforced a narrative of technological parity with the United States; for foreign militaries, they were an invitation to imagine a future in which Chinese carrier groups operate far from home waters with sophisticated air wings.
The footage matters because the Fujian is China’s first carrier designed from the keel up to use electromagnetic launch technology rather than the ski-jump ramps on its two older carriers, the Liaoning and the Shandong. A catapult lets aircraft take off with heavier weapons loads and more fuel, which translates directly into longer range and greater striking power. Without it, a carrier’s air wing operates under tight weight limits that reduce its effectiveness in a real fight. The public demonstration was Beijing’s way of saying the system works. The harder question is whether it works reliably enough to matter in a conflict, where launch cycles must continue in rough seas, in darkness, and under the stress of combat damage and system wear.
America’s Own Catapult Headaches
The United States has spent well over a decade wrestling with the same class of technology aboard its Ford-class carriers. The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, known as EMALS, and its companion Advanced Arresting Gear were supposed to replace the steam catapults and hydraulic arresting wires that have served the Navy since the Cold War. In practice, both systems have struggled with reliability. A Government Accountability Office report on major weapon systems documented ongoing problems with both EMALS and Advanced Arresting Gear on the Ford class, noting that the Navy did not expect either system to reach its reliability goals until the 2030s. For a platform billed as the future of American naval aviation, that is a sobering admission.
That timeline is striking. The USS Gerald R. Ford was commissioned in 2017, yet as of the GAO’s reporting, its launch and recovery systems were still years away from performing as designed under sustained operational tempo. The issues were not minor software glitches. They involved fundamental questions about how often the systems could cycle without failure, a metric that determines whether a carrier can generate the rapid sortie rates that define its value in combat. Each unplanned shutdown ripples across the flight deck, delaying takeoffs, compressing landing windows, and forcing commanders to accept gaps in air cover. If the world’s most experienced carrier navy has struggled to get electromagnetic launch technology to meet reliability goals after more than a decade of development and major investment, that history suggests China could face a similarly long maturation curve before its own system proves dependable at scale.
Why Reliability Decides a Carrier’s Worth
A carrier that cannot launch and recover aircraft at a sustained pace is not a warship. It is a vulnerable symbol that works only in good weather and low-stress conditions. The entire logic of carrier aviation depends on sortie generation rate, the number of missions an air wing can fly in a given period. Steam catapults, for all their bulk and maintenance demands, are well understood. Crews have operated them for decades, spare parts are plentiful, and failure modes are predictable. Electromagnetic systems promise smoother launches, less wear on airframes, and the ability to fine-tune the energy delivered to each aircraft type. They also, in theory, reduce the manpower and plumbing associated with high-pressure steam, freeing up space and weight for other systems on board.
Those advantages evaporate if the catapult goes down mid-operation and cannot be brought back online quickly. The GAO’s findings on the Ford class illustrate this tradeoff in concrete terms. When EMALS or the Advanced Arresting Gear failed during testing, the carrier’s ability to conduct flight operations dropped sharply. Workarounds existed, but they slowed the pace of launches and recoveries to a level that would be unacceptable in a high-intensity scenario such as a contested strait crossing or an air defense emergency. China’s Fujian faces the same physics and the same engineering constraints. Controlled demonstrations on calm seas with a handful of aircraft tell observers very little about how the system will perform when a carrier air wing needs to put dozens of sorties into the air over hours or days, including night operations and bad-weather recoveries when the margin for error is smallest.
What This Means for the Pacific Balance
Beijing’s two older carriers rely on ski-jump ramps, which limit the weight and fuel load of departing aircraft. The Fujian was supposed to close that gap by giving the People’s Liberation Army Navy a platform that could launch fully loaded strike fighters and, critically, the KJ-600 early warning aircraft that a carrier group needs to detect threats at long range. If the electromagnetic catapult proves unreliable in extended operations, the Fujian’s air wing will face the same constraints that hobble the Liaoning and Shandong, just with more expensive hardware sitting idle on deck. The difference in paper specifications between a ski-jump carrier and a catapult carrier matters far less than the difference in how many aircraft can be kept airborne, armed, and refueled in a crisis.
The broader strategic consequence is that, if Fujian’s catapult reliability follows the kind of maturation timeline the GAO describes for the U.S. systems, China may not be able to count on the ship as a fully dependable power-projection tool immediately after it enters service. The American experience suggests that even with aggressive testing and generous funding, electromagnetic launch systems take a long time to mature. The Navy’s own timeline, as documented in the GAO report, pushed reliability targets into the next decade. China’s defense industry has made rapid progress in shipbuilding and missile technology, but carrier aviation is a discipline where small mechanical failures cascade into large operational gaps. A catapult that works nine times out of ten is not good enough when the tenth failure grounds an entire squadron during a crisis, particularly in the confined and contested waters of the Western Pacific where timing and massed airpower can decide the outcome of a confrontation.
Impressive on Camera, Unproven at Sea
The CCTV footage of jets roaring off the Fujian’s bow is a genuine milestone for China’s navy. No other country besides the United States has attempted to field an electromagnetic catapult on a full-sized carrier, and the fact that Beijing has reached the flight-test stage at all reflects serious engineering capability. The images also serve a political purpose, signaling to domestic and foreign audiences that China is closing the gap in prestige systems long dominated by the U.S. Navy. For planners in Washington and allied capitals, however, the more important questions lie beneath the deck plates, in power electronics, software stability, and maintenance routines that never appear on state television.
Ultimately, the Fujian will be judged not by how it looks in a carefully edited broadcast but by how it performs in prolonged deployments and complex exercises. The U.S. experience with EMALS and Advanced Arresting Gear shows that electromagnetic launch technology can function in bursts yet still fall short of the relentless reliability a carrier needs to be credible in combat. Until China demonstrates that its own system can sustain high-tempo operations over months at sea, the Fujian remains impressive on camera but unproven at sea, a symbol of ambition whose true combat value will only become clear after years of quiet, untelevised testing and troubleshooting.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
