Funny how incredulous people are. The latest issue of a Polish magazine 'Armia'(Army) features a report from the last-year Zhuhai air show by Tomasz Szulc. The writer, otherwise a very competent journalist specializing in East European and Asian military hardware, snubs at the 5th gen. cockpit mockup as a 'ripoff from the F-35', and suggests that the new plane is at best in the early design stage and will get airborne, if at all, in two years' time at the earliest. I guess that, like some forum members here, he will now have to take his words back.
Although it would be insane to doubt the existence in metal of the J-20, in a link provided by one of the forum members I found info on another Chinese stealth plane(J-16?), supposedly being developed by Shenyang: a single engine triplane with canards, tailplanes and forward-swept wings. Until photos of this plane emerge, it indeed remains dubious, however over a year ago I bought for( a good excuse
) my then one-year old son a Chinese-made toy model of the Grumman X-29. It had drawn my interest as normally these toys attempt to represent popular types, like the F-14, F-16, F-22 or recently, the F-35B. I know it's absurd to link a toy to an actual aircraft but logically, since only a handful of FSW designs have been flown, if this report is true, the Chinese must have analyzed previous attempts at this configuration. It is possible that they've sought a light, agile and cheaper counterpart of the heavy J-20 interceptor, following the American and Russian approach.
To conclude, skepticism is useful and desirable, as it eliminates a lot of BS. Still, when a skeptic refuses to acknowledge certain facts, only because they seem to contradict his knowledge/beliefs, he turns into an irrational doctrinaire. If the J-20 has been speed-taxiing for the last couple of weeks, is it not logical that it has eventually taken off? Montage, PS is always possible, but to me the J-20 first flight is highly probable.
