PLA Figures

PLA honored model: Li Zhonghua

(PLA Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-29 18:04

Li Zhonghua. [Photo/PLA Daily]

The Central Military Commission (CMC) held a ceremony to confer the honorary title of "Heroic Test Pilot" on Li Zhonghua in Beijing on July 23, 2007. At the ceremony, Qiao Qingchen, member of the Central Military Commission and commander of the PLA Air Force, read out the order to confer the honorary title of "Heroic Test Pilot" on Li Zhonghua signed by Chairman Hu Jintao, and awarded the medal and certificate of the First-Class Hero to Li Zhonghua.

Li Zhonghua, a senior colonel and the former deputy commander of a test flight regiment of the PLA Air Force, has been promoted to be the deputy director of the Scientific Research and Ordering Department under the Armaments Department of the PLA Air Force this April. Li is a special-class pilot of the PLA Air Force, a meritorious pilot, one of the first batch of double-bachelor degree test pilots in China and an international test pilot.

He test-flew 61 highly difficult subjects of home-produced new-type fighters in five years, and 57 of which are Category-I risk subjects.

He was the first to master the stall trailing vortex test flight skill of a home-produced delta-wing fighter and a heavy-duty fighter, which filled in a gap in domestic test flight.

He was the first to fly Su-27 fighter among the Chinese test pilots and perform the highly difficult stunt known as "cobra maneuver", and he outnumbered all the other Chinese pilots in doing the same stunt.

He has test-flown 26 versions of three types of aircraft including fighters, bombers and transport planes with a record of 2250 hours of accident-free flight.

He had the record of successful handling 15 mid-air dangerous situations and five major ones. He was awarded one First-Class Merit, five Second-Class Merits and six Third-Class Merits.

He was rewarded with one special-class prize and one second-class prize of National Scientific and Technological Progress Award, and was granted successively four First-Class Merits, five Second-Class Merits and six Third-Class Merits by the national aviation industry department.

Ready for take-off. [Photo/PLA Daily]

Li Zhonghua joined in the command and control hall some researchers of a new fighter in studying the details of a new flight test. [Photo/PLA Daily]