The most repeated account of the J-15’s beginnings runs through Ukraine. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, an unfinished Su-33 carrier-fighter prototype — the T-10K-3 — is reported to have remained in Ukrainian hands, and China is said to have acquired it around 2001. Analysts believe Shenyang used it to accelerate development of a domestic carrier fighter, which is the basis for the persistent Western characterisation of the J-15 as a Su-33 clone.

China rejects that framing, describing the aircraft as a domestically developed design that pairs a Flanker-derived airframe with Chinese radar, avionics and weapons. Both accounts should be read with caution: the underlying details rest largely on analyst inference, satellite imagery and state-media footage rather than on official disclosure. What is not in dispute is that the J-15 gave the PLA Navy its first operational fixed-wing carrier fighter.

A ski-jump launch trades runway for a ramp: the aircraft accelerates along the deck and is flung upward, buying a few seconds for the engines and wings to take over. For a light fighter that works well; for a heavy Flanker it is marginal. To get airborne off the ramp the J-15 must keep its takeoff weight down, which in practice means less fuel, fewer weapons, or both. Reporting on STOBAR sorties has described loads limited to roughly a pair of anti-ship missiles plus air-to-air missiles. A catapult removes much of that penalty, which is a central reason China moved to the electromagnetic catapults on the Fujian. The exact numbers here are estimates drawn from imagery and analysis, not published figures.

For much of its life the J-15 was the last Chinese Flanker derivative still flying on the Russian AL-31F. China’s goal was to replace it with the indigenous WS-10 “Taihang” family, and in November 2022 state television aired footage of operational J-15s fitted with a navalised WS-10 (reported as the WS-10H). The programme has reportedly had teething issues over the years — questions about thrust, engine life and maritime corrosion protection — and open sources cannot say precisely how many airframes now fly the domestic engine versus the Russian one. Treat any firm split as an estimate.

The J-15 is a Chinese state product, built for the PLA Navy and never sold on an open market, so a firm flyaway unit price simply does not exist in the public record. Nor is there a credible public cost-per-flight-hour figure for the type. Even the number of aircraft built is not officially disclosed — open-source estimates have ranged from a couple of dozen in the late 2010s to figures in the region of fifty or more since, but these are analyst estimates that vary widely and should not be read as sourced totals. Any precise dollar figure attached to a J-15 online is, in practice, a guess.