The Q-5, J-7, J-8 and older PLAAF aircraft
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It was a canards experimental fighter that preceeded the J-9 program that aimed to develop a 4th gen fighter. The J-9 led to the J-10 program in the 1980s-90s where Israeli and Russian consultation on FBW as a hedge against China's own FBW programs back then, finally resulted in J-10. Some Lavi design elements were no doubt incorporated into J-10 program but the two are still quite different in the sense that the Lavi program at most contributes some "lessons" for developing the flight controls for an advanced (back then) 4th gen canard fighter but so different that none of the actual flight control can be used owing to completely different weights, and specific aerodynamics between the two.
Basically J-8 -> J-8II -> J-9 program and studies for modern 4th gen canard fighter -> Lavi and FBW developments domestic and the consultations with Israelis and Russians -> J-10.
As with all major moonshot programs with China, they hedge and have backups. They also consult, cooperate, learn where and when they can. The Chinese FBW development team suffered a massive setback after losing a significant part of the team during an accident. I think program management back then really required some serious rethinking to risk so many members of such an important team on one test flight even. Back then they didn't have the data recording technologies that are anywhere near what the West had in the 1980s/90s. Could have been partly why they risked so many high level engineers. But they did have domestic FBW program/s and cooperative FBW programs paying Russians and Israelis for consultations. No one has talked that much about the depth of their consultations but I recall watching a Chinese documentary on J-10 or China's FBW program where this was mentioned. IIRC the member of those programs said the Russians and Israelis were clearly holding back on a lot of stuff and were more in the role of teacher marking your paper only rather than showing you how to do everything. The cooperation still though would have been invaluable nonetheless if nothing more than simply avoiding time consuming and expensive error filled paths.
In fact I have no concrete numbers, at best rough estimates based on older data, in fact I need to check and re-count them but overall as it seems, the PLAAF is indeed retiring J-7/8s quite soon and expanding the J-10C/J-16 units.
Need to check.
Now I'm confused ... this image clearly shows some very old Q-5 but I never saw a 70x0x serial number?
Scramble Magazine does not not list it in their "CHINESE SERIAL SYSTEM" and after some search I did not find anything too.
Can anyone help me out what unit this is?
(Image via @航空新视野-赤卫 from Weibo)
Scramble Magazine does not not list it in their "CHINESE SERIAL SYSTEM" and after some search I did not find anything too.
Can anyone help me out what unit this is?
(Image via @航空新视野-赤卫 from Weibo)
Excelent photo! The 50th Air Division - 7xx0x.
About the photo: The 28th Division (in the distance: 2xx9x) and the 50th Division's (in the foreground: 7xx0x) Q-5 aircrafts prepare for the parade in 1984. The honor of the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Another time - the same point of view:
About the photo: The 28th Division (in the distance: 2xx9x) and the 50th Division's (in the foreground: 7xx0x) Q-5 aircrafts prepare for the parade in 1984. The honor of the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Another time - the same point of view:
Indeed, we've got it ... 50th Air Division; and I made a stupid typo!
I guess it's up to debate just how much benefit there is from doing recon by high speed/high altitude plane.
The US had the SR-71 yet they chose the subsonic U-2 over it and retired the Blackbird.
The US also has F-15, comfortably faster than F-16, yet it's the latter that's the carrier of recon pods, not the former.
Israeli AF uses recon pods both on their F-15 and F-16.
Today, when a recon pod like DB110 is credited with 80 nautical mile range at useful resolution, there might be fairly few situations when overflying at well over mach 2 is needed. Indeed, who knows if flying at mach 2 causes enough vibrations that a recon pod can't stabilize the camera as well as it could at subsonic speed. So maybe effective range for decent image quality then drops to just a few dozen nautical miles.
Speed is probably always a plus up to a certain point. When it comes at a cost of range, loiter time, maintenance, availability or image quality - then who knows just how worthwhile it all is.
Now, a completely unrelated question to the recon issue that you made me think of.
I am aware that lots of people think J-8 is the fastest fighter plane China has. I've tried actually finding a source for that that's either a website of some government entity (CATIC, CASIC etc?). Or a photo of a manufacturer's brochure from an airshow. Can anyone help?
Actually, I did find this one brochure photo of F-8T but the photographer didn't manage to capture the important parts... is there ANY other, complete image of that brochure, anywhere on the internet?
Please note that I am not discussing whether J-8 is indeed the fastest or not, or how fast it might/should be. I am merely looking for sources.
Notice that I didn't say that J-8 is the fastest bird in PLAAF. I said that it is the fastest in clean configuration and is optimized for high speed performance in a way that neither the flanker nor the J-10 is.
SR-71 is not retired because the USAF doesn't want high speed reconnaissance plane but rather because it is very expensive and difficult to maintain compared to other aircraft. If high speed recon is useless then they wouldn't have bothered with SR-72. That said, J-8 is easy and cheap to maintain.