A carrier is only as capable as the people who work its deck. On 14 July 2026, the People’s Liberation Army Navy released imagery that made this point plainly: J-15-family fighters running full-cycle takeoff and landing training on land, methodically expanding the pool of pilots and deck crews China will need to operate its newest carrier at a serious tempo.

The footage is not, on its face, dramatic — aircraft launching, recovering, taxiing, being serviced and sent up again. But the deliberate repetition is the story. Beijing is building the human infrastructure behind the Fujian, its third and most advanced carrier, and the first fitted with electromagnetic catapults rather than a ski jump.

A Ground School the Size of a Flight Deck

The training is centred on Huangdicun, near Huludao in Liaoning province — the PLA Navy’s principal carrier-aviation test and training base. Satellite imagery of the site has long shown ski-jump ramps, arresting gear, carrier-deck markings and, more recently, land-based catapult tracks. For this exercise a section of runway was painted to replicate a carrier landing area, and crews moved and serviced the aircraft through a complete operating cycle.

The method is unremarkable precisely because it works: every established carrier navy first builds its procedures ashore, where mistakes are cheap. What matters is scale. Sustaining high-tempo operations at sea requires far more than a handful of qualified aviators; it requires an entire trained ecosystem of launch officers, arresting-gear teams, fuellers and ordnance crews. That is what the PLA Navy is now producing in volume.

That is the optimistic, state-media reading. Western analysts are more measured, noting that generating a truly proficient carrier air wing — one that can surge sorties day and night in contested conditions — typically takes years of at-sea work beyond the first successful launches. The land-based drills are a necessary step, not a finished capability.

Why the Catapult Changes the Math

The Fujian’s electromagnetic catapults are what make this build-up significant. A ski-jump forces a fighter to launch on its own thrust, capping its takeoff weight and therefore its fuel and weapons. A catapult removes that ceiling. Earlier July 2026 imagery reportedly showed a catapult-capable J-15T leaving the Fujian carrying four YJ-83K anti-ship missiles — roughly 2.9 tonnes of ordnance before fuel or air-to-air weapons — against the one or two missiles typically seen on ski-jump-launched J-15s. Those figures come from imagery analysis rather than official data and should be read as approximate.

The practical effect is straightforward. A catapult carrier can send heavier, longer-legged strike aircraft aloft, and do so more often. Realising that advantage depends entirely on having enough trained crews to keep the cycle running — which is exactly what the latest drills are meant to deliver.

The Trajectory

China has moved from launching the Fujian to catapult trials to combat-capability work at a pace few navies have matched. Chinese official media has stated the carrier is expected to reach full combat capability during 2026. Whether that timeline holds, the direction is unambiguous: a methodical, industrial-scale effort to field a genuine blue-water carrier force, one trained deck crew at a time.

PLA footage of the Fujian’s electromagnetic catapults launching J-15T, J-35 and KJ-600 aircraft — the capability the current land-based training is meant to sustain at scale.

Sources: Army Recognition; Global Times; Defense Mirror; Military Watch Magazine; The War Zone.