J-20... The New Generation Fighter II

Engineer said:

Various big shrimps on Chinese BBS said that PLAAF wants the aircraft to be inducted by 2016. If it's true, flight tests would have to be completed before then.

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latenlazy said:

The J-10 took longer to officially induct than intended. I have no reason to believe that the more ambitious timeline will be met, especially given how conservative leadership is in regards success over speed. This is especially true if revisions are made to the design, which I think isn't unreasonable given that this is China's first stealth project. In any case, we will see.

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MwRYum said:

The J-10 project stretched out so long were because one, the role requirement keep changing and two, the technological constraints of its industrial bases, for back then China was behind the contemporary world standard by 3 decades at least.

But for J-20, while 2016 deadline is still an ambitious one, with the kind of funding Chinese gov't is pouring into it and today's industrial bases, they may yet pull this off.

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latenlazy said:

The J-10 took longer to officially induct than intended. I have no reason to believe that the more ambitious timeline will be met, especially given how conservative leadership is in regards success over speed. This is especially true if revisions are made to the design, which I think isn't unreasonable given that this is China's first stealth project. In any case, we will see.

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latenlazy said:

I certainly don't think the technology will be a problem. It's just there's no substitute for time in the testing phase. You need to find and iron out potential problems and come up with the fixes, and once you come up with the fixes you need to see if those have problems. That revision process will take time no matter how much money you put into it. This is especially true since China hasn't had experience with stealth platforms before. 2016 is 5 years away,

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airsuperiority said:

I agree with you both and can see where you both are getting at. This is also why I gave my response earlier regarding how soon it can roll out. Given how fast the tests are coming out, it is even possible that the WS-15 is nearing completion, which means we may see swaps or god-knows-what in the short while. If the WS-15 is installed within 2 years (or maybe even latter half of this year since there's always a chance the WS-15 is just that much down the road already), then 2016 will still be ambitious, but plausible. This is possible since none of us know how far down the road the WS-15 is, and since there were so many speculations initially during January about the WS-15 being tested with J-20, it's not entirely impossible that maybe the WS-15 is already nearing completion, and maybe very soon we'll see new tests with WS-15 swapped.

Anyways aside from my rambling, we'll see what happens soon.

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latenlazy said:

We haven't heard news about the WS-15 for a while unfortunately. I'm going to guess we won't unless it hits a major setback or until it's hit its design requirements. What makes me feel super conservative about the engines though is that I don't think they'll strap in two prototypes in a new airframe, at least not until they're satisfied with the engine's own tests. In other words, even though the engine is being produced in parallel, disparities in developmental timeline and pace could create a good chance for delays. (I know, that sounds super pessimistic).

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