Chengdu J-20 pictures, analysis and speculation Part II

[VH]

I have mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, if they came up with everything on their own, then kudos to them and an awesome job. One the other hand I can't help but feel a little sick inside at the complete and utter incompetence of the people doing security on US programs.

 

[Triton]

I have mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, if they came up with everything on their own, then kudos to them and an awesome job. One the other hand I can't help but feel a little sick inside at the complete and utter incompetence of the people doing security on US programs.

It is difficult to accept the claim of Chinese test pilot Xu Yongling that the Chengdu J-20 is a masterpiece of home-grown innovation. :

 

[Trident]

No doubt a lot of aspects and detail solutions are uncomfortably close to LM products (to the extent that you could probably very successfully kit-bash a J-20 from an F-22 model with F-35 intakes and F-117 fins), but putting all of these bits and pieces together into a fighter of completely different basic configuration does represent quite an achievement for an aerospace industry that was 30 years behind the state of the art only 20 years ago. In some fields, it means they went through 50 years of progress in those two decades, which is worthy of a hat-tip.
There are certainly worse instances of aerospace IP theft by China currently going on, take the Z-20.

 

[Foxglove]

Could somebody explain it once and for all: is the camo carried by the F-22, F-35 and now J-20 some special foil, hence the metallic sheen and contours framed with an undercoat of grey paint? I read about experiments carried out by the USAF with foil camouflage years ago, the purpose being great savings on maintenance and much longer life of the coating but can only guess if it has been implemented on series 5 gen aircraft.
Foil or not, do the Chinese have to ape everything from the Americans? Soon they'll be celebrating Thanksgiving, eating s'mores and voting for Dabya.

 

[Trident]

I believe it's "low emissivity" paint, which helps reduce infrared signature.

 

[Blitzo]

I have mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, if they came up with everything on their own, then kudos to them and an awesome job. One the other hand I can't help but feel a little sick inside at the complete and utter incompetence of the people doing security on US programs.

It is difficult to accept the claim of Chinese test pilot Xu Yongling that the Chengdu J-20 is a masterpiece of home-grown innovation. :

All vehicles of any kind superficially borrow elements from one another, to the point where you could describe any aircraft as the sum of parts of others...
But unless we're reducing aerospace engineering down to blindly blending a few elements of other planes into something else in the hopes that it'll achieve your desired performance, I'm not really sure if you are serious or not.

Frankly, I'd be more impressed if J-20 really did owe its existence thanks to espionage, because that would mean either they managed to garner enough data to overhaul their military aerospace industry standards to build a fighter of this calibre as well as enough information and schematics to create their own aircraft, and/or it shows the sheer capability of the existing industry beforehand because if we are taking media at face value then the cyber espionage should only have started earnestly in the last half decade or so, meaning they were able to take a paper plane in about a year or two and turn it into a prototype.


Thank goodness that we can judge the scale of R&D that has gone into an aircraft by sheer virtue of a few superficial features. In that case, I suppose we can confidently say PAK FA, J-31, ATD-X, KFX, AMCA and TFX are all concepts plagarized from the F-22 and F-35! Wow, lockheed really needs to take a good look at its security. Absolutely tragic.

 

[latenlazy]

Could somebody explain it once and for all: is the camo carried by the F-22, F-35 and now J-20 some special foil, hence the metallic sheen and contours framed with an undercoat of grey paint? I read about experiments carried out by the USAF with foil camouflage years ago, the purpose being great savings on maintenance and much longer life of the coating but can only guess if it has been implemented on series 5 gen aircraft.
Foil or not, do the Chinese have to ape everything from the Americans? Soon they'll be celebrating Thanksgiving, eating s'mores and voting for Dabya.

Two people can take the same approach to solve a math problem without referencing each other. The laws of physics are the same for everyone.

 

[latenlazy]

Doubled by accident.

 

[lancer21]

They simply want to beat the americans at their own game.

Seeing the gasps and rolled eyes at simply ENOURMOUS achievements for the chinese aerospace (regardless through what means- the national objective is what is paramount) like J-20, J-31 and other high profile weapons developments, wait to see the screams and tears of anger when their new strategic and possibly theater bombers will appear. My god!

I fondly remember the days when some truly desperate characters were trying to show that J-20 is nothing more than PS made of S-37, F-117 tails etc etc. Fun days. ;D

 

[sferrin]

I have mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, if they came up with everything on their own, then kudos to them and an awesome job. One the other hand I can't help but feel a little sick inside at the complete and utter incompetence of the people doing security on US programs.

It is difficult to accept the claim of Chinese test pilot Xu Yongling that the Chengdu J-20 is a masterpiece of home-grown innovation. :

All vehicles of any kind superficially borrow elements from one another, to the point where you could describe any aircraft as the sum of parts of others...

That would explain why the YF-22 and YF-23 looked so much alike. Or the X-32 and X-35. Oh, wait. . ..

 

[Blitzo]

That would explain why the YF-22 and YF-23 looked so much alike. Or the X-32 and X-35. Oh, wait. . ..

Depending on how superficial you want to get, one can easily spin out the similarities between them.


In fact you just illustrated my point, which is that a few superficial lookalikes are just that, lookalikes, and there's a spectrum of it.

 

[latenlazy]

I have mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, if they came up with everything on their own, then kudos to them and an awesome job. One the other hand I can't help but feel a little sick inside at the complete and utter incompetence of the people doing security on US programs.

It is difficult to accept the claim of Chinese test pilot Xu Yongling that the Chengdu J-20 is a masterpiece of home-grown innovation. :

All vehicles of any kind superficially borrow elements from one another, to the point where you could describe any aircraft as the sum of parts of others...

That would explain why the YF-22 and YF-23 looked so much alike. Or the X-32 and X-35. Oh, wait. . ..

What about the yf-23 and the t-50? Or the ATD-X and the F-22? Side note on the X-32. It tried to be too cute by half.

 

[Triton]

All vehicles of any kind superficially borrow elements from one another, to the point where you could describe any aircraft as the sum of parts of others...
But unless we're reducing aerospace engineering down to blindly blending a few elements of other planes into something else in the hopes that it'll achieve your desired performance, I'm not really sure if you are serious or not.

Frankly, I'd be more impressed if J-20 really did owe its existence thanks to espionage, because that would mean either they managed to garner enough data to overhaul their military aerospace industry standards to build a fighter of this calibre as well as enough information and schematics to create their own aircraft, and/or it shows the sheer capability of the existing industry beforehand because if we are taking media at face value then the cyber espionage should only have started earnestly in the last half decade or so, meaning they were able to take a paper plane in about a year or two and turn it into a prototype.


Thank goodness that we can judge the scale of R&D that has gone into an aircraft by sheer virtue of a few superficial features. In that case, I suppose we can confidently say PAK FA, J-31, ATD-X, KFX, AMCA and TFX are all concepts plagarized from the F-22 and F-35! Wow, lockheed really needs to take a good look at its security. Absolutely tragic.[/font]

Amazing how quickly they leaped from manufacturing counterfeit Russian fighters to the fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 to the Shenyang J-31. I am sure that the secret information that they bought from Noshir Gowadia concerning the B-2 Spirit and their cyber-espionage activities, including theft of FB-22 and F-35 data, was of no use to them.

 

[latenlazy]

All vehicles of any kind superficially borrow elements from one another, to the point where you could describe any aircraft as the sum of parts of others...
But unless we're reducing aerospace engineering down to blindly blending a few elements of other planes into something else in the hopes that it'll achieve your desired performance, I'm not really sure if you are serious or not.

Frankly, I'd be more impressed if J-20 really did owe its existence thanks to espionage, because that would mean either they managed to garner enough data to overhaul their military aerospace industry standards to build a fighter of this calibre as well as enough information and schematics to create their own aircraft, and/or it shows the sheer capability of the existing industry beforehand because if we are taking media at face value then the cyber espionage should only have started earnestly in the last half decade or so, meaning they were able to take a paper plane in about a year or two and turn it into a prototype.


Thank goodness that we can judge the scale of R&D that has gone into an aircraft by sheer virtue of a few superficial features. In that case, I suppose we can confidently say PAK FA, J-31, ATD-X, KFX, AMCA and TFX are all concepts plagarized from the F-22 and F-35! Wow, lockheed really needs to take a good look at its security. Absolutely tragic.[/font]

Amazing how quickly they leaped from manufacturing counterfeit Russian fighters to the fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 to the Shenyang J-31. I am sure that the secret information that they bought from Noshir Gowadia concerning the B-2 Spirit and their cyber-espionage activities, including theft of FB-22 and F-35 data, was of no use to them.

Maybe, but it's a question of how much. Personally my understanding of the J-20's development suggests that supercomputers, parallel development, and some early Russian technical assistance (both state sponsored and poached from the end of the Soviet Union) had a much bigger role. To give some specifics, we know the J-XX project was started in the 90s, we have a study of its general aerodynamic configuration from 2000, and a wind tunnel model from 2006. All of these predate reporting of the security breaches. Furthermore the timeline suggests that China didn't jump generations as quickly as you're suggesting. The appropriate analog is the J-10's first prototype and the J-20's, which is a space of twenty years.

 

[sferrin]

That would explain why the YF-22 and YF-23 looked so much alike. Or the X-32 and X-35. Oh, wait. . ..

Depending on how superficial you want to get, one can easily spin out the similarities between them.


In fact you just illustrated my point, which is that a few superficial lookalikes are just that, lookalikes, and there's a spectrum of it.

I have a bridge for sale. You sound like a buyer.

 

[Blitzo]

Amazing how quickly they leaped from manufacturing counterfeit Russian fighters to the fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 to the Shenyang J-31. I am sure that the secret information that they bought from Noshir Gowadia concerning the B-2 Spirit and their cyber-espionage activities, including theft of FB-22 and F-35 data, was of no use to them.

... Where did I say espionage didn't help its development? And like latenlazy said, it isn't actually that big of a leap in the first place.


Extent of espionage is the subject at hand, along with just how easily you can mish mash the parts of planes together into a functioning aircraft, which was more aimed at trident's comment.

 

[Triton]

The Chengdu J-20 also resembles the Mikoyan Project 1.44 "Flatpack."

 

[Blitzo]

The Chengdu J-20 also resembles the Mikoyan Project 1.44 "Flatpack."

And that statement's not even being made in parody :'(

 

[Sundog]

You guys realize such arguments are pointless, right?

1) Yes they stole our tech., and some of it went into these designs. It happens in companies I've worked for (reverse engineering) and it happens in every country. This isn't something unique to China or Chinese companies.

2) Well of course their stealth airplanes look similar to other stealth airplanes; RADAR waves work the same in China as they do the rest of the world.

3) Of course their airplanes look like other planes designed for the same mission. There's a reason for that, and it has everything to do with the state of technology in the world and mission parameters. Aerodynamics is the same there as it is here.

4) I wonder how many people know just how many of their Aeronautical engineers were trained in the U.S.? When I was in school in the 80's over half of the grad. students were Chinese, paid to learn Aero Engineering here by the Chinese government.

 

[LowObservable]

Concur, Sundog.

Also, one big advantage over cyber-vs.-bloke-with-Minox espionage is that the sources and methods are much less sensitive - in fact the nature of cyber exploits is that they are transient.

I can therefore afford to give the Chengdu design office much better access to the product, and may even involve them in directing collection. I can also create a relationship between my open-source collection efforts and my penetration team.

Another point: I would speculate that it's very helpful, when following somebody's national lead in a certain technology, to know what they tried and did not work. In that case, the end product may not use the same technology as products of the competing industry that you are targeting - but you have still benefited greatly from cyber-espionage.

 

[latenlazy]

Concur, Sundog.

Also, one big advantage over cyber-vs.-bloke-with-Minox espionage is that the sources and methods are much less sensitive - in fact the nature of cyber exploits is that they are transient.

I can therefore afford to give the Chengdu design office much better access to the product, and may even involve them in directing collection. I can also create a relationship between my open-source collection efforts and my penetration team.

Another point: I would speculate that it's very helpful, when following somebody's national lead in a certain technology, to know what they tried and did not work. In that case, the end product may not use the same technology as products of the competing industry that you are targeting - but you have still benefited greatly from cyber-espionage.

Precisely my thoughts. That intelligence has far more value than a simple blueprint so it would be remiss to assume their interest is driven (purely) by the desire to reverse engineer technology.

On a tangent. If someone steals your trade secret, studies it to understand the concepts and then comes up with their own solutions should that be considered copying? This conversation can afford some nuance.

 

[Mat Parry]

bravo LO! I imagine the arrangement you describe would work quite nicely It often occurs to me that SP forums is one of my favourite open source collection efforts

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Yeah, the whole donations thing is a cover - the Chinese Communist Party bankroll this site ;D

 

[fightingirish]

This Image is said to Show how the J-20 211's nozzle are said to look like even THIS image is a PS-fake !

Just found the full image at Alert 5.
I can't say if this picture is PS-ed. ???


Source: http://alert5.com/2014/01/20/high-res-photo-of-j-20-2011-with-aam/

 

[latenlazy]

This Image is said to Show how the J-20 211's nozzle are said to look like even THIS image is a PS-fake !

Just found the full image at Alert 5.
I can't say if this picture is PS-ed. ???


Source: http://alert5.com/2014/01/20/high-res-photo-of-j-20-2011-with-aam/

PS

 

[Deino]

Here is the original image !!

 

[Deino]

The J-20's EOTS !??!

 

[Ian33]

The J-20's EOTS !??!

Oh damn! good eyes to spot that one Deino, good eyes indeed. Do you think they will run with this on all of their new stealth warplanes?

 

[Triton]

"J-20 could be as famous as the Zero: Japanese magazine"
Staff Reporter
2014-01-29

Source:
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20140129000056

Although some consider Chinese fighters to be little more than less impressive copies of Russian designs, the J-20, China's first fifth-generation stealth fighter, has the potential to become one of the world's most famous military aircraft like Japan's Mitsubishi A6M Zero during World War II, according to Aireview, a Japanese magazine covering military aviation news.

Before the Zero was put into action against the Russian-built I-15bis and I-16 fighters operated by the Republic of China Air Force over Chongqing in September 1940, most Western military experts had similar feeling towards the Japanese fighter as people have towards Chinese fighters today, the magazine said.

Claire Lee Chennault, the legendary leader of the Flying Tigers — a group of American volunteer aviators recruited to help the ROC combat Japanese forces — sent warning to Washington about the threat posed by the Japanese fighter at the time, however none of his supervisors believed that Japan was able to effectively design its own plane.

The United States eventually learned a hard lesson when the Zero fighters wiped out the US air defense at Pearl Harbor and Manila in December 1941. The Zero's performance in the early stage of the Pacific War led many to see it as one of the most famous fighters of World War II. Aireview stated that China is now developing an advanced fighter which shares a similar reputation to the Zero.

The article also said that Chinese fighters are currently only superior in number, but not in quality, adding that without active electronically scanned array radar, China's J-10A fighter is unlikely to defeat Japan's American-built F-15J in aerial warfare. The J-10B, the upgrade version of J-10A, is reported to be equipped with active electronically scanned array radar, but China does not have enough early warning aircraft compared to the United States and Japan, the magazine said.

Meanwhile, the Japan Air Self-Defense Force has 17 early warning aircraft and China has 11 — among them, only five are the most advanced Chinese KJ-2000 early warning planes. The People's Liberation Army Air Force and Navy Air Force have around 1,500 fighters, five times the number of Japan, however China will still not be able to win a decisive air war against Tokyo. However, the article maintained that China will be able to fix these problems in the future.

The J-10B and its successor, the J-20, both have the potential to reach the same level of fame as the Zero fighter during World War II, the magazine said, if the Chinese aviation industry is capable of upgrading the aircraft's software. With a large fuselage, Aireview stated that the J-20 is likely to be designed as a long-range multi-role fighter which can also be used as a tactical bomber. As for the J-31, its main purpose is to be exported to those developing nations which are not able to purchase US-built F-35, the magazine added.

 

[Deino]

"J-20 could be as famous as the Zero: Japanese magazine"
Staff Reporter
2014-01-29

Source:
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20140129000056

Sorry to say so, but "wantchinatimes" is - esp. in Chinese military related issues an as reliable source as to quote the German "Bild" on politics, economics and international relations.

Just take a look at this BS they publish:

http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20131223000088&cid=1101

Deino

 

[Deino]

Following the end of the Chinese New Year holydays and the Spring Festival it seems as if '2011' is preparing for its maiden flight !!!

 

[Deino]

.... another one !

 

[Deino]

Finally some news ... high speed taxi tests were done !!!

 

[Radical]

Is it me, or is it that the wing LERX is no longer curved?

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Is it me, or is it that the wing LERX is no longer curved?

Bit hard to tell without higher res pics, but it looks like it might be.


The odd material on the tail edges is harder to explain unless its a rough external "blanket" of RAM for testing purposes. Any ideas?

 

[latenlazy]

Is it me, or is it that the wing LERX is no longer curved?

Bit hard to tell without higher res pics, but it looks like it might be.


The odd material on the tail edges is harder to explain unless its a rough external "blanket" of RAM for testing purposes. Any ideas?

Are you talking about the tailbooms?

 

[Blitzo]

Is it me, or is it that the wing LERX is no longer curved?

Bit hard to tell without higher res pics, but it looks like it might be.


The odd material on the tail edges is harder to explain unless its a rough external "blanket" of RAM for testing purposes. Any ideas?

The different tail boom colour/material look a bit extensive to be RAM. Reminds me more of a pair of radomes. I wonder if two tail mounted radars that size would be feasible

 

[latenlazy]

Is it me, or is it that the wing LERX is no longer curved?

Bit hard to tell without higher res pics, but it looks like it might be.


The odd material on the tail edges is harder to explain unless its a rough external "blanket" of RAM for testing purposes. Any ideas?

The different tail boom colour/material look a bit extensive to be RAM. Reminds me more of a pair of radomes. I wonder if two tail mounted radars that size would be feasible

That's what I was wondering, if they were sensors of some sort.

 

[Deino]

Here's a video ... + a larger new image !!

http://v.ifeng.com/include/exterior.swf?AutoPlay=false&guid=013e5a9a-dea1-4b86-aa7e-673e1527639d

Deino

 

[sferrin]

That's a good looking plane.