Captain Yue, on the other hand, dutifully obeys the myriad petty orders and then ignores the only one that counts. "I believe the plane has a soul," he tells the military tribunal, explaining why he refused to eject as ordered. Not only does he keep his wings, but he receives a standing ovation.
The film, a production by the PLA's August First Film Studio, in collaboration with the Political Department of the PLA Air Force and the Propaganda Department of the Beijing Municipal Government, is not real life. But many of the PLA's organizational weaknesses depicted in Skyfighters strongly resonate with what professionals observe.
The PLA's highest-profile challenge is to operate its newly revamped Ukrainian aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, with indigenously produced planes fitted with reverse-engineered Soviet technology, and fulfill China's ambitions to project military power offshore.
Last week, the Liaoning's captain, Zhang Zheng, and Rear Admiral Song Xue briefed defense attachés in Beijing and confirmed an ambition to build bigger carriers with greater capabilities. They also admitted to having only 12 trained pilots for the J-15 fighters they plan to deploy, according to sources who were present, suggesting it may be decades before Chinese carriers are operating effectively at sea.
"They've got to learn to operate on cloudy no-moon nights, where there is no horizon, and to land on a deck that's pitching 10, 12 feet," says Rubel, of the U.S. Naval War College. Even more crucial, he says, is developing the systems and culture to learn from inevitable mistakes.
The U.S. Navy lost a staggering 13,000 aircraft and 9,000 air crew in the four decades after World War II, mostly due to accidents, not enemy fire, as its pilots adjusted to the lethal combination of jet engines and aircraft carriers. Rubel says that much of those losses were due to a U.S. Navy culture where ship captains were naturally conditioned to survive on their wits at sea, and the early navy aviators threw caution to the wind because the chance of death was so high. Both the U.S. Air Force and the Navy established safety centers and procedures. The accident rate plummeted in the Air Force, with its centralized structure and standardized practices, but kept rising in the Navy. It didn't fully settle down until 1983, when Top Gun was made.
China's learning curve may be even steeper. The challenge of operating battle groups and jet-powered air wings at sea, which took four decades to overcome in the U.S. Navy, is multiplied in a Chinese political system where politics explicitly trumps professionalism in all facets of organized life and there is no transparency or independent institutions to monitor and regulate the game.
Chinese officers admit they have a long way to go, but say that risk tolerance is rising under tougher demands from the new commander-in-chief, Xi Jinping. "Accidents are the price that must be paid to improve combat capability," said Air Force Senior Colonel Dai Xu. "This is the price for scientific progress."
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