> Not sure where this idea comes from. Air combat cannot be commanded. Or you mean something else. Obviously nobody commands the entire fight since the enemy a

> Not sure where this idea comes from. Air combat cannot be commanded. Or you mean something else. Obviously nobody commands the entire fight since the enemy also gets a say in what happens. What I meant is that Chinese pilots are trained to take direction from ground controllers that are looking at the integrated air picture from all of their surveillance systems. It's called ground controlled intercept (GCI). China and the former Soviet Union countries are heavily reliant on GCI. The idea is that the pilot is busy flying the plane and can't see the integrated picture in the cockpit, so a person on the ground that can see the full picture and isn't distracted by flying can make better tactical decisions about which targets to engage, when to shoot, and when to go out (turn away). A Chinese pilot hears on the radio "Callsign, turn to heading 170, Mach 0.9, target 5 miles" and doesn't know what else is going on around him. The GCI style gets severely degraded when communications go down, because the pilots lose the guidance in their ear. The comparison is that western pilots are told what the air picture looks like and then the formation commander decides who to target. Western pilots hear "Hostiles at x position, y position, and z position" and then mutually decide who each person is going to target based on contracts (they pre-decided on the ground that #1 and #2 in formation get the northern target and #3 and #4 get the southern target, whoever is done first gets the trailing target) and then listening to the formation commander to catch any mistakes. It's complicated for the pilots but works better when communications go down.