KJ-600

The eyes for China's real carrier — the KJ-600 is the first fixed-wing airborne early-warning aircraft to operate from a Chinese aircraft carrier, a twin-turboprop with a rotodome that looks unmistakably like America's E-2 Hawkeye and does the same job: it flies high above the fleet and turns a carrier group from a cluster of ships with horizon-limited radars into a networked force that sees hundreds of kilometers out. Catapulted off the Fujian's electromagnetic launch system, it closes the single biggest capability gap between the PLAN's carriers and the US Navy's — the organic radar picture that makes a carrier a carrier.

Overview

The Xi'an KJ-600 (nicknamed "Nezha") is China's carrier-based airborne early-warning and control aircraft — a twin-turboprop, quad-tailed, folding-wing design with a large dorsal rotodome, built by AVIC's Xi'an division for the PLA Naval Air Force. Its role is transformational for Chinese naval aviation: the PLAN's first two carriers (Liaoning and Shandong) are ski-jump STOBAR ships that could only carry helicopter-based AEW as a stopgap, leaving their air wings dependent on short-ranged, low-altitude radar. The KJ-600 changes that — but only on a catapult carrier, because a heavy, slow AEW turboprop cannot launch off a ski-jump. That is why it and the Type 003 Fujian, China's first electromagnetic-catapult (EMALS) carrier, are inseparable: the Fujian exists to launch aircraft like the KJ-600, and the KJ-600 exists to give the Fujian's air wing the elevated radar picture that defines modern carrier operations. First flown in August 2020, debuted in the September 2025 Victory Day parade, demonstrated in EMALS launch-and-recovery trials aboard the Fujian in September 2025, and aboard the carrier at its November 2025 commissioning, the KJ-600 is fielded — though the Fujian's full air-wing operational capability is still being worked up through 2026. It is the "Chinese E-2 Hawkeye" in form and function, and its arrival marks the moment PLAN carrier aviation reached for genuine blue-water capability.

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