These things are from the mouths of engineers working in CAC, if your Chinese reading is reasonable good, you can go to CJDBY.net, unlike some other internet military-fan chatrooms,this one is very popular because it get some professionals there, including at least two engineers working in CAC and one former engineer from SAC, and several current pilots from airforce, and several engineers works in other departments in China military industry complex.
Officially, General Zhang Zhaozhong openly claimed the maiden flight of J-XX will be around 2010 to 2011 in his TV interview, althrough laterly his TV show get downplayed seriously and the second part of his TV show which is supposed to discuss the details of this aircraft has been totally banned as well as his own personal blog.
Vice-commander of PLAAF also claim the 5th generation fighter will get maiden flight soon and will enter service by 2017-2019, so 2010-2011 is a quite reasonable time for maiden flight.
As for SAC, you get to understand a bit of the Chinese politics to understand why they get the opporunities to mess this project up even through they have lost the competition, quite some of the senior officials in today's China aero industry group are from SAC, so they feel the need to force CAC to share some part of cakes of this big fat project with SAC, sort of warfares, you know.
The job awarded to SAC has nothing to do with the layout or the core design, only some manufactering task since in theory, SAC should get more experience in empolying Ti-based alloys comparing to CAC yet it seems that they screw this up as well and will most likely miss the deadline.
I think SAC also get some structral design work of the bottom of the fighter.
Actually, the PLAAF is very unsatified about SAC's proprosals, and the 5th generation competition is rather one-sided, the SAC's proprosals are pathetic, one is a carbon-copy of F-22, the other is a werid combination of F-22, J-8 with an set of front wings with no gruantee of a capable flight control can be developed on time espeically given SAC's track record.
In contrast, CAC's proprosal is very new and promising:
According to the research paper published in 2001 by CAC's project leader, its layout is an unqiue combination of lifting-bodyed, parrelleled, upwards canard blended into a set of long and large leading edge blended into the main body of the aircraft.
The aircraft would either get no tails or get very small V-tails (~1/10th the size of convential layout fighters), it shows such layout, comparing to the convential ones, will make the fighter become extremely agile even at extreme attack angles and maintain very good supersonic and stealth performance, with TVC, the fighter's manuerves will be in a league of its own.
Since Chinese airforce believe the fight between 5th generation fighters will most likely settled through dog-fights, so they like this design.
So it is highly unlikely that CAC's design will be changed much after SAC get involved in this project.
