**sighs**
At their height, the F6 rebuild factory, the F7 rebuilt factory, and the Mirage rebuild factory were able to make almost all components for those aircraft locally and could probably, if asked, have made new aircraft just from spares they were making. In fact, there was a serious proposal to make a next-generation Mirage by building a ROSE airframe and put tech developed for JF17 in it.
These dam factories were able to revive our Cobra gun ships from the dead in the last few years.
The actual on-the-ground difference between licensed production and joint production can be hard to ascertain, but FFS, the Jeff was designed by a joint team of CAC and PAC (PAC made mockups) and the contract specified that CAC would produce (with PAC input) the initial prototypes, both would be involved in testing, both in China and Pakistan, the CAC would lead and assist CAC in designing and fabricating tooling, and setting up propduction fasciities in Pakistan. PAC to this day has the capability to make the full jet, and there has been serious talk about making it fully in Pakistan, it would take 1-3 years to set it up.
The avionics are all made in Pakistan, the radars have been developed in China, and are manufactured in Pakistan.
***********sigh***********
Okay, how about you and I make a plan and talk to one of the CPDs of the JF-17 program.
I'm serious.
We can talk to the folks who set up the MRO for RD-93, who've managed Block-2, who've set up the design for Block-3, etc. You name it, they're all retired now, and you can ask them to verify each and every point you have up there.
But before we do that, let's at least refer back to basic first principles:
1. Folks (I'm not attributing any of this to the PAF officers who did the work as they'll never claim such a thing) say we supported in the design of the JF-17. Yet, we don't have a single senior DESIGN expert going INTO NOR COMING OUT of the JF-17 program. NOT ONE. What does that tell you? It tells you that we didn't contribute to the core design work of the Thunder nor did we produce anyone who learned enough to carry the work without CAC's team in the flow.
2. The radar and avionics are produced locally themselves draw on imported inputs. I know as much because I personally know the men leading the main contractors, like Teresol. They designed some of the original avionics for the JF-17, but they themselves will tell you where they get the critical inputs fabbed from (i.e., China or the West). Yes, it's great that these entities can DESIGN and even INTEGRATE COTS into new solutions. This is excellent, but, the value add from this activity is marginal relative to the cost of buying all of the actual COTS inputs we need to put it together.
3. Manufacturing the whole JF-17 in Pakistan was never the issue because even if PAC did that, the value would still need to be imported from China. This is the part that all the people amongst us have trouble understanding.
BTW, it was no different with the F-7s, F-6s, or even Mirage III/5s. However, with the Mirages at least, work was happening outside of France, like in RSA, to literally manufacture new wings and other aero-structures from scratch. Atlas had the literal complete jigs for this and we even reached a point with them where we bought some surplus NEW Cheetah wings from their plants to retrofit onto our Mirages.
But the point of bringing this up isn't to say that we'd be No. 1 with RSA and not China. Rather, it is to refute the ridiculous claim that we'd be a 300 F-7 force without China or the JF-17. That's not true, we did have other routes.
