I am no aeronautical engineer or airflow expert....however, if we consider what happens in nature, the feathers of birds do flutter in control of flight / airflow. They do change the shape of their wings in flight. For planes, we only have that much control surfaces. Call it nature mimicking or maybe it is a result of computers arriving at the same "solution" as birds to the same "problem". The most intriguing part of China's 6 Gen fighters are the sheer number of control surfaces....
Shenyang next gen combat aircraft thread
- Thread starter Blitzo
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imo the if the FCS is making the wingtips oscillating this much then the yaw axis is almost certainly underdamped, which the team should’ve been able to catch this pretty early on in the development.
The oscillation would cause the side slip to constantly change which is not great for aerodynamic efficiency, and the wingtips themselves moving that much that often would create drag issues
Another possibility is that they’re testing the mechanical strain on the wingtips and its actuators in specific kinds of flight conditions. Wouldn’t just be important to validate structural integrity of those parts but also test and establish aerodynamic margins.
Finally no Tianpu New Energy Solar Water Heater in the way!
I think one of the most fascinating aspects, that will probably take an extremely long time to find out, is whether the control surfaces just move on pilot input or whether there's some constant automatic adjustment happening to stabilize the aircraft.
They definitely move automatically to stabilize the aircraft, modern FBW aircrafts already do this and it’s safe to assume that the new fighters will as well.