The only C-130HE electric fighter aircraft of the Chinese army. (File photo, taken by reporter Yu Tailang)
[Reporter Luo Tianbin/Reporting from Taipei] The "Electronic Warfare Legend" EC-130H "Compass Call" electronic combat aircraft, which has been in service in the U.S. Air Force for more than 45 years, recently completed a six-hour final flight mission with a new generation EA-37B electronic combat aircraft formation at Davis-Monthan Base. This handover of the century not only announced the official retirement of this veteran of the US military who had participated in countless battles in Panama, Iraq, etc., but also made military fans around the world once again turn their attention to the Taiwan Air Force - because the Chinese army also has an extremely mysterious C-130HE "Tiangan aircraft" (machine number 1351), and it still maintains combat readiness and performs missions every day.
Although Taiwan's Tiangan aircraft are also modified from C-130 transport aircraft, they are completely different in performance from the EC-130H that has just been retired from service by the US military. The US military's EC-130H is an "offensive electric fighter", and its mission is to actively transmit high-power signals to directly paralyze the enemy's radar and communication network; while Taiwan's Tiangan aircraft was built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is essentially focused on "electronic reconnaissance and signal interception." It is like a "super tailwind" in the Taiwan Strait airspace. It has been wandering on the edge of the invisible defense line for a long time, specially intercepting the radar and communication parameters of the Communist Army, and establishing a precious enemy information database for the National Army.
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The EC-130H electric fighter aircraft, which has been in service in the U.S. Air Force for more than 45 years, recently performed its final flight mission, marking a perfect end to its glorious service career. (Picture: DVIDS website)
This strange-looking Tianganji is nicknamed the "Pharaoh" among military fans because of its high confidentiality. Its most conspicuous feature is that multiple large knife-shaped antennas have been modified on both sides of the nose, which look like "long beards" and are specially used to capture radio signals from across the strait. In addition, a drum-shaped radome is installed on the back and belly of the aircraft, which contains a highly sensitive radar positioning system. As soon as the Communist army turns on the radar, the Tiangan aircraft can immediately lock its precise position and conduct tactical countermeasures through the jamming antenna on the tail.
Military personnel pointed out today that in the face of the new electronic combat aircraft such as the Yun-8 and Yun-9 that the Communist Army has continuously introduced in recent years, our country's electronic combat aircraft, which has been in service for nearly 30 years, is facing the dual test of the aging of its body and system. The biggest bottleneck of the Tiangan aircraft is that the generator capacity of the old transport aircraft has reached its peak, making it difficult to cope with modern high-energy-consuming electronic warfare. To this end, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has actively led performance improvement tests in recent years and introduced advanced "Digital Radio Frequency Memory Technology (DRFM)", which not only intercepts enemy radar waves and creates thousands of false targets to deceive the enemy, but also implements high-speed frequency hopping interference against the Communist Army's tactical data link, cutting off communication between the enemy's frontline and rear command posts.
Military sources also said that there is still no plan to eliminate the Tianganji and it is still the core combat capability of the 20th Electronic Warfare Brigade. However, as the Air Force plans to purchase a new generation of C-130J transport aircraft from the United States in the future, the military is also closely evaluating two future trends: one is to continue to independently upgrade the existing airframes by the Chinese Academy of Sciences; the other is to strive to introduce a business jet modification platform that is similar to the US military's new generation EA-37B, so that Taiwan's aerial electric warfare energy can officially enter a new era of "active suppression" from "passive defense".
