J-20 5th Generation Fighter VII

if I were an F15 or F16 fighter pilot facing a J20, I would be peeing in my pants in the cockpit.
the same should apply to a J16 or J10 pilot facing an F22 or F35.
so the psychological stress/impact on your adversary flying an older generation plane is immense and likely unbearable.
For this reason alone (and there are many other reasons) China should go for more J20/J31 at the expense of J16/J10.
but I believe the bottleneck will not be costs as China is only spending a small percentage of its GDP on military hardware but the number of qualified pilots China can produce annually because I hear that more and more Chinese youths are suffering from myopia.

Jono said:

if I were an F15 or F16 fighter pilot facing a J20, I would be peeing in my pants in the cockpit.
the same should apply to a J16 or J10 pilot facing an F22 or F35.
so the psychological stress/impact on your adversary flying an older generation plane is immense and likely unbearable.
For this reason alone (and there are many other reasons) China should go for more J20/J31 at the expense of J16/J10.
but I believe the bottleneck will not be costs as China is only spending a small percentage of its GDP on military hardware but the number of qualified pilots China can produce annually because I hear that more and more Chinese youths are suffering from myopia.

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None sense. China has whole bunch of pilot on older aircrafts to retire like j8, jh7, earlier flankers, earlier j10. China definitely has more pilots than advanced aircraft so much they are keeping j8 in service. As for myopia even if China has 4x myopia as US China would still have more people with healthy eyes than Americans.

TK3600 said:

None sense. China has whole bunch of pilot on older aircrafts to retire like j8, jh7, earlier flankers, earlier j10. China definitely has more pilots than advanced aircraft so much they are keeping j8 in service. As for myopia even if China has 4x myopia as US China would still have more people with healthy eyes than Americans.

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my counter-argument is that it may be easier to train a J20 pilot from the very beginning rather than to convert an older pilot from older generation fighter planes because the J20/J31 are so much more high-tech planes to require higher proficiency and skills??
for that matter, a young person with a higher IQ should be better qualified?
therefore, a higher myopia rate among university students would be a definite handicap in recruitment in my humble opinion.

TK3600 said:

None sense. China has whole bunch of pilot on older aircrafts to retire like j8, jh7, earlier flankers, earlier j10. China definitely has more pilots than advanced aircraft so much they are keeping j8 in service. As for myopia even if China has 4x myopia as US China would still have more people with healthy eyes than Americans.

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the total number of J-8 could be less than 30 now, and there should be no more than 4 brigades J-7 in services, that's about 100

More high-resolution images from Zhuhai...

Jono said:

my counter-argument is that it may be easier to train a J20 pilot from the very beginning rather than to convert an older pilot from older generation fighter planes because the J20/J31 are so much more high-tech planes to require higher proficiency and skills??
for that matter, a young person with a higher IQ should be better qualified?
therefore, a higher myopia rate among university students would be a definite handicap in recruitment in my humble opinion.

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Do you know that Mainland China produce almost as many university graduates per year as the total population of Hong Kong? They have the luxury to filter out the un-fits and select as many able body pilot cadets as they want from these 7 million graduates per year.

Assumed they only need to recruit 1,000 cadet pilots per year to match the total number of aircraft entering service, would that not be enough? If not enough, they can easily recruit 2,000 or 3,000 cadet pilots without difficulty.

latenlazy said:

Non LO fighters will become increasingly unsurvivable going into the future. If you need a fleet of 1000-2000 fighters they will all eventually need to be stealthy. As sensors get more powerful you will need proliferation of LO platforms just to maintain parity of capabilities. It’s not like a fleet of 1000-1500 J-20s will be coming at the expense of other airframes either. The overall fleet of modern aircraft the PLAAF will need to field is set to grow so long as their primary objective is being able to cover conflict against the US+regional security partners. What we thought was “reasonable” a decade ago was a combined function of lower geopolitical tensions plus capabilities bottlenecks. The norm then was never the ideal.

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If you have to hang large AAM or strike missiles under the wings, that is going to kill airframe stealth
So then a Flanker airframe is preferable to a J-20.

Going back to the numbers, 1600+ new J-20 with another 400 Flankers is not unreasonable.

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By 2032, you'd be looking at an air fleet with a minimum of:

1600+ J-20
400 J-16 (new)
200 J-16 (existing)
200 J-10 (existing)
? J-31/J-35

But as a thought experiment, it's far cheaper to build a large number of missiles or drones to destroy opposing aircraft on the ground, than build fighter jets to destroy aircraft in the air.

For example, let's say a J-20 costs roughly $100 Mn. So 100 would cost $10 Bn
For the same money you could buy 500K Shaheed-type loitering munitions @ $20K each
That figure of 500K loitering munitions in not a typo

That is sufficient to swarm all the airbases within the 1st/2nd Island Chain and destroy all aircraft on the ground

AndrewS said:

If you have to hang large AAM or strike missiles under the wings, that is going to kill airframe stealth
So then a Flanker airframe is preferable to a J-20.

Going back to the numbers, 1600+ new J-20 with another 400 Flankers is not unreasonable.

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If you really need a missile truck for A2A roles drones are probably going to be better than J-16s going into the future. Of course that technology is not mature yet so you’ll still need J-16s but that’s probably where things are headed.

AndrewS said:

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By 2032, you'd be looking at an air fleet with a minimum of:

1600+ J-20
400 J-16 (new)
200 J-16 (existing)
200 J-10 (existing)
? J-31/J-35

But as a thought experiment, it's far cheaper to build a large number of missiles or drones to destroy opposing aircraft on the ground, than build fighter jets to destroy aircraft in the air.

For example, let's say a J-20 costs roughly $100 Mn. So 100 would cost $10 Bn
For the same money you could buy 500K Shaheed-type loitering munitions @ $20K each
That figure of 500K loitering munitions in not a typo

That is sufficient to swarm all the airbases within the 1st/2nd Island Chain and destroy all aircraft on the ground

Click to expand...

Cheaper? Sure. But you cannot do all your force planning around single option strategies, or at least it’s best not to if you’re not resource constrained the way China was twenty years ago.

One thing to remember is that just because you can build 200 J20s a year doesn’t mean you have to.

Not saying they are building up a peak capacity of such huge volumes, but it would not be uncommon to establish a peak capacity that is not fully utilised as part of contingency planning. It’s better to have the capacity and not use it than to need that capacity and not have it.