plawolf
Lieutenant General
That makes sense. So they are playing around with TVC now, very interesting.
Although one has to wonder why it took them so long since the Russians have been offering TVC for maybe a decade by now.
In that respects, it does make me more hopeful that this is a prelude to a J10D which features TVC.
If they just wanted to do a limited study and play around with TVC, they could easily have bought a few sample TVC capable engines years ago from Russia and completed their studies before now.
It only makes sense to delay testing TVC until TVC is ready on a domestic engine if your goal is to operationally field that domestic TVC engine, so don’t want to have to do all the flight testing twice, as much of the flight testing done with a TVC AL31 would need to be repeated on the WS10 TVC because of the almost certainly different weight, thurst and other key performance benchmarks between the two engines.
TVC is most useful in the subsonic region, whereas delta canards are more inherently suited to the transonic region. So if the new engines adds enough thrust to offset the weight gain, it could be that TVC is added primarily to help boost the J10’s subsonic region agility to remove that ‘weakness’ and make it superior in all flight regimes.
