Thanks Blitzo! I do find it odd that we are not seeing any primer birds, confirmed new tail numbers seem to have dried up?? I suppose my real concern is that there are not any solid leads from even anonymous sources??
But, as I said, China has surprised me more than once, and neither do we have any rumors of real troubles? so we may all get a surprise someday soon..
As you may recall initial batch production seemed to hover very firmly at around 4 new birds a year....
We haven't had any good or up to date pictures of planes at the factory since late 2015, when we saw s/n 2101 in yellow primer -- nothing like between early 2010 and late 2015 when we had semi regular photos of the factor and the J-20 prototypes that would newly emerge.
Since late 2015 we've had very intermittent pictures of the factory (maybe one picture every few months) but we are never sure how up to date they are, and they never reveal anything useful (like allowing us to gauge what annual production rate is).
The lack of pictures from the factory is almost certainly by design -- i.e.: now that J-20 has entered the production phase and is equipping PLAAF units, they are deliberately clamping down on our ability to accurately estimate how many aircraft may exist in service. That is also why sometimes they hide the serial numbers of new in service aircraft, so that we don't know which unit they're assigned to. And even when they do (such as for the 62001 s/n J-20 at 9th brigade that we've seen), they often only show us the "lowest" number so we are unable to estimate how many actual aircraft there may be at any one time. E.g.: at 9th brigade in Wuhu from satellite pictures we've identified 3 J-20s at that base, yet they only show us the "01" airframe at the unit.
We've seen this pattern in the past for other aircraft as well such as SAC Flankers and even for J-10 production to a smaller degree (especially more recently).
