A day before the US Navy helicopter and a fighter jet crashed into the South China Sea on Sunday during routine operations, the US military experts had mocked China's Fujian aircraft carrier. The irony was not lost on Chinese military mouth piece which took potshots at the US, which highlighed the embarassing episode.
The Chinese military mouthpiece's tit-for-tat mockery came after Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, and retired Lt. Cmdr. Keith Stewart, claimed China's Fujian Aircraft Carrier wasn't a competition to the US Navy's Nimitz-class carrier.
Schuster and Stewart, speaking to CNN after examining the photographs of the Fujian aircraft carrier, claimed that the Fujian can only conduct air operations at about a 60 per cent rate of the 1950’s US Navy Nimitz-class carrier. “The Fujian’s operational capability is only about 60% of that of the Nimitz class,” Schuster said.
A step forward for China's blue water navy.
— Shen Shiwei 沈诗伟 (@shen_shiwei) September 12, 2025
🇨🇳China's third aircraft carrier, the Fujian passes through Taiwan Straits to hold tests, training in #SouthChinaSea.
By the way, the Taiwan Strait is not 'international waters'.
The Fujian is China's first fully domestically… pic.twitter.com/3ffANYEbMH
They pointed out that the deck layout of the vehicles limits simultaneous take-offs and landings.
Schuster said that Fujian’s landing area is longer than that of the Nimitz (One of the US’s largest warships), meaning it extends too close to the bow area where aircraft are positioned for catapult-assisted launching. They said that it affected the aircraft's ability to quickly launch the fighter jets.
China built the Fujian with an electromagnetic catapult aircraft launching system – “which allows aircraft to take off with heavier weapon and fuel loads so they can strike enemy targets from greater distances,” the report said.
The officials said that even though the country has built an advanced carrier, it knew nothing of actual combat experience. “Building a shiny new carrier is nice, but I would postulate that the Chinese ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ about carrier ops,” Stewart said. He said that it can only be learned by practice in all kinds of conditions.
On Monday, a US military helicopter and a fighter jet went down in separate incidents in the South China Sea while conducting routine operations.
The aircrafts, a F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet and an MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter, which both took off from the U.S.S Nimitz, went down just half an hour of each other on Sunday afternoon.
The aircrafts were part of the US's freedom-of-navigation exercises meant to counter the influence of China in the South China Sea.
The U.S.S. Nimitz is the oldest American aircraft carrier in active service.
