I have said it before, but there's major implications for all of China's aerospace industry for the two 6th gens. There's so many western videos and articles talking about the two planes as standalones, but none of them realize that insane implications that they have on the boarder picture.
For most of modern history, China has been behind the West in basically all areas of technology, especially in aerospace/aviation. China has been catching up fast in basically every area, basically neck and neck with America in most fields and even slightly exceeding them in others. But catching up is one thing, actually surpassing America in a meaningful way, especially in such a complicated field like aerospace that China has always struggled with is another thing entirely. I was always kind of scared that China would catch up with America and just kind of plateau, keeping pace with America with incremental improvements but too scared/conservative to actually take a big step forward without someone taking the first step. I'm glad to have been proven wrong.
This has applies to all of China of course, this shows that the chinese people and chinese companies are willing to actually embrace radical new designs and revolutionary new technology and that the central government is daring enough to actually fund said projects, even to the tune of the how many tens of billions it probably will take for the development of the two new 6th gen planes. This has major implications for every new project undertaken by China in the future and not just in aerospace, maybe it's not impossible to see the next generation destroyer with a heavy focus on laser weapons or nuclear submarines or nuclear carriers with molten salt/liquid metal nuclear reactors instead of the traditional pressured water reactor in the near future.
The pace is also insane. Compared to America's decades of flying stealth planes and their very mature aerospace industry, China is moving very very fast. A decade ago the J-20 wasn't even in active service yet and yet here we have the 6th gen prototypes already flying. America on the other hand, has been sitting on the F-22 for decades, and the F-35 has had some serious developmental issues and delays and it looks like the NGAD looks set to continue that trend. I'm not sure how Chengdu and Shenyang is doing it, be it good leadership, a clear goal, good computer modeling program assisted by an insane amount of supercomputing, all those wind tunnels finally paying off or they are throwing an insane amount of money and engineers at the problem. But however they are doing it, hopefully it spreads to the rest of the chinese aerospace sector and beyond. Of course this speed will apply to other future projects as well, whatever new drones/CCAs are in development, future upgrades for the J-36/J-50, and of course upgrades to the existing 4th/5th gen fleets.
Also random tangent here, but China is doing all of this with a immature commerical aerospace and aviation sector. One reason why America has always had such an advanced and large air force is because they have always dominated commerical aviation. Both the American civilan and military sectors supported each other in a virtuous cycle much like how Chinese commerical shipbuilding sector and the Chinese navy is supporting each other. All this insane pace of innovation and development China is doing, it's with a commerical aviation and aerospace sector that isn't contributing much as compared to their American counterparts. By the 2030s, which will also be around the time that this new planes enter service, China should have a relatively mature commerical aerospace sector that will be paying dividends in R&D, generating money and in training skilled engineers and scientists. It will be interesting to see how much faster Chinese development can go when they can leverage a large and mature commerical aviation/aerospace sector like how America does.
