China Demonstrates New Capability to Refuel Strategic Bombers at Sea: How the YY-20 Aerial Tanker is Expanding the Fleet’s Reach

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force has for the first time demonstrated its ability to utilise its new fleet of YY-20 aerial tankers to refuel its H-6 strategic bombers, extending the range of its large fleet of very diversely armed long range combat jets. The YY-20 was developed as a derivative of the world’s largest military transport jet in production today, the Y-20, and first began combat readiness training in late 2022. With China previously having had a negligible tanker capability comprised of three ex-Soviet Armed Forces Il-78M jets, and a number of converted H-6 bomber airframes, the YY-20 has long been expected to play a central role in facilitating longer range operations. A key reason for the lack of investment in tankers is that Chinese fighter aircraft have significantly longer ranges than their Western counterparts, with its most capable fighters today the J-20 and J-16 far outranging any of their Western counterparts when operating on internal fuel, while the J-20 has approximately twice the range of its American rival the F-35. Chinese bombers, however, are much shorter ranged than their American or Russian counterparts, with the H-6 being a much lighter design built for regional operations, rather than an intercontinental range design like the American B-2 or Russian Tu-160. This makes the ability to extend the H-6’s range particularly valuable.

The H-6 is currently by far the most widely fielded bomber class in the world, with the People’s Liberation Army Air Force estimated to deploy approximately 270 of the aircraft. The bomber class is relied on for a wide range of roles, with the H-6G variant having been configured for electronic attack, the H-6J and H-6N for cruise missile carriage, and the H-6K for carriage of long range ballistic missiles, to name but a few examples. The aircraft have long been expected to play a central role in launching ballistic and cruise missile attacks on U.S. and allied forces across the Pacific in the event of a new conflict in the region, but when paired with the YY-20, they can potentially operate much further beyond the Second Island Chain to project power into the wider Pacific. This range extension complements the benefits of integrating longer range missile classes, such as the CM-401 ballistic missile first seen carried by the H-6K in 2018. A further less complex means of extending the H-6 fleet’s reach has been to deploy the aircraft to bases on Russian territory, with the aircraft having landed in Russia multiple times for joint exercises, and in June 2024 deployed from their for their first ever operations off the coast of Alaska. As the YY-20 has continued to expand the reach of the Chinese fleet, the development of a higher end tanker class designed to operate in more contested environments, and benefiting from advanced stealth capabilities that are increasingly widely seen in Chinese long range military aircraft, has widely been speculated.