J-20... The New Generation Fighter

Roger604 said:

Then they can get JF-17 to fill in the numbers, replace the J-7, J-8, etc. (This is Tphuang's idea, not mine.)

I'm 90% sure J-20 program is moving much faster than we thought. There is no room for J-10B in the timeline.

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Totoro said:

Exactly. First flight early in 2011., testing throughout 2011 with two prototypes. By the end of 2012. additional prototypes join in, testing escalates, perhaps reaches over 600 flight hours. 2013. several preproduction examples are built, testing goes on. Raptor fleet at LM logged in 1700 testing hours before production examples were handed over to USAF. Larger preproduction batches are ready by 2014, testing in nearing its conclusion. In 2015 first production examples are handed over to PLAAF test facilities. Another two years are usually then needed before first combat squadron or two are ready for initial operational capability status. That's around 2017. Add in some unexpected developmental problems and that could easely extend to 2018. or even a year later.

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Lion said:

Check out Huitong website. When comes to China military reliability. I put him the foremost. He usually do his homwork before posting it.

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Roger604 said:

I don't think J-10B will make it into service. Instead, the J-20 program (5th generation multirole fighter) is moving much faster than expected. I think J-20 will enter service with FWS10A engines by 2013 (possibly even earlier in late 2012). It appears the Central Military Commission wants the J-20 ready fast for patrol of South China Sea. Anti-ship will be a very important mission for J-20.

This suggests J-10 production will end earlier than expected. They won't order more AL-31FN. FWS10A might be used for later production blocks and when existing J-10 need engine replacement.

In addition to the J-20 multirole fighter, CAC might also have a pure air-superiority fighter in the works. Progress on this will depend on WS-15's progress. If the WS-15 is ready by 2015, the air-superiority fighter should enter service not long after that.

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Engineer said:

You clearly got things reversed. J-20 IS the air-superiority fighter, it is intended to directly challenge the F-22 in Western Pacific. There are plenty of other planes in China's inventory that can do anti-ship mission, and in South China sea, H6's are more than enough.

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Roger604 said:

I disagree. J-20 is a VLO design with true 4S capability. But it's definitely designed with multirole in mind. This is by no means a bad thing. CMC needs something that can project power deep into South China Sea and even Malacca Straits. In particular, the wings are high-mounted to give maximum space for an anti-ship missile.

A J-20 has a better chance at evading SPY-1 on the Arleigh Burke compared to a cruise missile. It has a better chance to avoid being tracked by SPG-62. It can get close to a Hawkeye before getting detected. To a CVBG, a regiment of incoming J-20 carrying short-range, high-speed ASM is more dangerous than facing the same number of long-range ASM fired at stand-off distances by H-6.

I can also see J-20 loitering over a battlefield in a Taiwan scenario hitting mobile targets like Patriot batteries and radars with PGM. And if an F-22 arrives from Guam, well, it can hold its own too!

I think something more blended wing with smaller vertical stabilizer would be even better at air superiority than J-20 but then it wouldn't be multirole, so for China's purposes J-20 is more pressing.

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Skywatcher said:

But where are you going to fit in the munitions? The J-20, at 19-21 meters long, probably won't have room to take on anything larger than a SDB.

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Now that the last few skeptics have been converted to the idea that the J-20 is a real airplane, and not the product of a network of Chinese teenage boys armed with Photoshop, the internetz are rife with speculation about the project's schedule, technology and capabilities.

Much of it is both premature and misguided, the result of several basic errors in analysis, politics and prejudice.

The first mistake is "mirror imaging". The Tu-22M Backfire was not a B-1, but the USAF wanted it to be one, because they desperately wanted to resurrect the B-1. The MiG-25 looked like the air-superiority fighters that the USAF was sketching in the late 1960s, but it was nothing of the sort. And just because the front end of the J-20 looks like an F-22 does not mean that it is an F-22 clone.

One problem with mirror-imaging is the unspoken assumption that the other guys face the same challenges that you do. But to take a couple of examples, the Russians in the Cold War never had to worry about a dense, layered surface-to-air missile threat and the US does not face an adversary with a significant carrier force.

A related source of error is an attempt to exploit the appearance of a new Chinese or Russian system to support a pre-existing belief system. That's why people who want more defense spending will upsell the threat, and predict that the new whatever-it-is will be operational next week and in production at a rate of 100 per year, and those on the other side will point to the adversary's primitive technology level, and argue that the new aircraft is merely an X-plane. The right answer usually lies between those points, but more importantly, it won't be found that way.

There's a healthy dose of cultural prejudice behind both errors. Mirror-imaging, in the Cold War and today, is supported by the idea that Communists are unimaginative bureaucrats who can't innovate their way out of a wet paper bag. We found out this wasn't true, on a massive scale, after 1991: for instance, the combination of helmet-mounted sights and high off-boresight missiles sent the US scrambling to develop the AIM-9X, and US spy satellites fly on Energomash RD-180 engines.

China's military engineers and planners have unintentionally reinforced this image over the decades, preferring to upgrade Soviet-era systems rather than developing new platforms. But that tends to obscure the fact that (to take one example) the latest version of the HQ-2 surface-to-air missile bears only an external resemblance to the Soviet V-750.

Since the current military modernization started, new weapons havev been increasingly innovative. The question of Israeli technical assistance notwithstanding, the J-10 does not resemble any other fighter, and the J-10B less so. In other domains, systems like the Type 022 fast missile boat resemble nothing anywhere else (and could that be one reason for the fast-paced ONR/DARPA LRASM program?).

Next question: what does the J-20 look like from a Chinese perspective? Watch this space.

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