Originally Posted by
atakacs
Fairly new airframe.
Maybe to the operator, but was it secondhand ?
The Shaanxi Y-8 is essentially a 1950s Soviet-era Antonov 12 4-engined turboprop aircraft (same engines and props as the Ilyushin 18), semi-licence manufactured in China. "Semi" because, during the project in the 1960s, Soviet and China fell into disagreement, so some of the aspects were just reverse-engineered from Antonovs the Chinese had in stock. It had a range of initial handling difficulties where the reverse engineering was not quite right. The Chinese enlisted some help from Lockheed to fix the handling issues, although Lockheed mainly wanted to sell the Hercules to China as a replacement. Production, as with some other Chinese-built copies, appears to have been a handful or less per year over a lengthy period.
Appears not to have had any use other than the PLA Air Force and some foreign forces where the Chinese decided to give the aircraft away.