sorry it was misunderstanding. so much confusion regarding J-20 number of units annually.
lyman2003 and some other Weibo accounts saying this.
J-20 5th Generation Fighter VII
- Thread starter siegecrossbow
- Start date
- Status
lyman2003 and some other Weibo accounts saying this.
escobar
Brigadier
because some dude called lyman2003 and other weibo accounts say that, it's certainly true
Agreed, but we haven‘t seen such a high production rate for the Flankers … and we have such high claims also since years and still they are not correct or at least don‘t fit with the number of aircraft in service.
I know, we surely don‘t know all in service but if such a high rate would be true since 2020/21, there must be several units more active which are simply not.
What are the production rates for J-10s? That would be a more suitable proxy since those are made by CAC. What do you estimate J-20 production numbers to be now?
It seems like J-16 production this year is pretty high.
As for J-20, if we just count the WS-10C eqiupped ones, we have around 2 dadui with 172 brigade, 2 dadui with 1st brigade, 1 dadui with 5th, 1 dadui with 65th and 1 dadui with 111th (maybe less than that) by end of last year. That's up to 70 aircraft from second half of 2019 to end of 2021. It seems to me they probably did deliver 30 to 40 last year. This year, I think it's likely to go up to 40 to 50.
That seems extremely unlikely. If we saw a J-20 mounted with two WS-15s, maybe this would be plausible. We’re not even sure the current J-20 test plane with the single swapped engine is flying with a WS-15 or just a WS-10 with TVC. Even if it were a WS-15 we don’t know if the goal of this test plane is TVC flight control development, or integration testing, or testing performance parameters of a development phase prototype that can’t be done on a bench. Even if this were the final phase of development testing for the WS-15, if the J-20 is supposed to have a new extensive design iteration with the new engine clearly the testing for that revision is not going to be done on the current single swapped engine airframe, since that one is an old 201X prototype. This alone would add another 1-2 years of testing of the revised design. At best we’re still talking 1-2 years away from production. And I think the most likely scenario is we’re talking 3-4 years. We will see what happens but I think you should vet your sources more rigorously.
There's a difference between when engine production starts and when it's integrated into airframes. I expect the PLAAF will want to build a stockpile of WS-15s it can draw from rather than use a just-in-time system for airframes to mitigate risks.
Furthermore, we don't know how far along testing is and given the tightened security levels in China, we shouldn't expect to see pictures of two engine tests.
Those would be pre-production engines, and if we’re going by what leaks we know of that started happening maybe 3-4 years ago. Production stage is when you’ve hard committed to everything in the design and you’re assembling a factory line to churn them out consistently. They will not be making that kind of commitment before they do the integration testing because during integration testing they may still need to make tweaks to the design. Before that stage you can stockpile engines without setting up a factory production line by simply building a bunch in small batches (which is what you have to do anyways once you’ve moved onto the verification stage of development).
We don’t have a *concrete* sense of where they are in testing, but the fact that they did a single engine swap on an old airframe is pretty indicative of where they are in a general sense. It tells us that the engine design is mature enough for them to be confident flying it in J-20 airframe, probably performing decently aggressive maneuvers, but not yet mature enough to stick two of them into a newly developed production test unit for a revision of the J-20 design. We can narrow down the reasons for why they are that specific band of confidence, because it can only be associated with certain specific stages or components of the development timeline.
Last edited:
J-10 may not be a good reference for direct comparison as CAC built a “even bigger” factory site in late 2018 to early 2019 dedicate to j-20 production. Also recent rumor suggest that GAC is going to gradually taken over most of the j-10 production from the end of this year, and the old factory will have space to produce J-20 and uav
but FYI, j-10 peak production in previous was ~40+, and this year, till sep j-20 has been produced ~30 (from 90- to 110-120), so we should expect further expansion in the next few years
- Status