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Dissecting China's New Combat Aircraft Designs

2025/1/8
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Graham Warwick
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Robert Wall
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Steve Trimble
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Tony Osborne
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Steve Trimble: 我认为最好的描述方法是从时间顺序入手。12月26日,也就是英国的节礼日,也是中国毛泽东的生日,中国社交媒体上出现了之前从未见过的飞机图像和视频,旁边还有一架歼-20S追击机。……中国空军现代化发展迅速,其发展速度和规模令人印象深刻。 中国新型战斗机具有独特的技术特征,代表了中国军事现代化实力的显著提升,并且不再单纯模仿西方技术。其中一款新型战斗机是无尾三角翼布局的三发飞机,拥有一个顶部进气口和两个腹部进气口,以及一个较大的弹仓。另一款新型战斗机也是无尾布局,采用双发设计,其外形与美国YF-23战斗机相似。 Graham Warwick: 中国新型三发战斗机体积巨大,其尺寸可能与F-111相似甚至更大,并采用串列式起落架。三发发动机设计可能用于提高飞机起飞推力,并在巡航阶段关闭其中一个发动机以提高燃油效率。中国新型三发战斗机采用无尾翼设计,并使用翼尖上的分裂式方向舵进行偏航控制,其进气口设计独特,顶部进气口与机身顶部几乎无缝融合。中国新型双发战斗机的图片质量较差,其设计独特,从不同角度观察其外形会有截然不同的感受。从上方观察,这款双发战斗机与美国NGAD概念飞机相似,采用后掠式机翼和前置升力机身。这款双发战斗机尺寸与歼-16相似,但其机身中部较为肥大,这对于超音速飞机来说可能并非最佳设计。 Tony Osborne: 中国新型三发战斗机的尺寸比F-111战斗机更大,并采用并排座舱布局。中国新型三发战斗机可能具有战术轰炸机的角色,其大型雷达和弹仓表明其可能具备远程攻击能力。 Robert Wall: 中国新型战斗机的成熟度和技术水平尚不明确,其是否达到第六代战斗机的标准也存在争议。中国新型三发战斗机并非第六代战斗机,其顶部进气口在高攻角下效率低下,更像是战术轰炸机。中国新型三发战斗机设计成熟,可能处于后期原型机或量产前阶段。根据五角大楼的报告,中国新型战斗机可能在2035年前服役。中国新型战斗机可能用于应对台湾潜在冲突中的防御反击行动,并具备打击关岛等目标的能力。中国国防工业发展迅速,同时开展多个军事航空项目,其发展速度和规模令人震惊。

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As we enter the new year, are you ready for takeoff? Parker Aerospace is a leader in the production of innovative technology that supports reliable, efficient, and increasingly sustainable flight, including comprehensive aftermarket support. A partner of choice for OEMs and MROs, Parker helps solve complex challenges to achieve the extraordinary.

Stay in the know with Parker Aerospace on LinkedIn at Parker Aerospace or at parker.com/aerospace. Happy New Year and welcome to another year of Aviation Week Check 6 podcasts. Today we look at not one but two new Chinese combat aircraft that broke cover on the internet on December 26. As my colleague Steve Trimble has pointed out, it's become something of a thing for China to show new military equipment to mark the birthday of Chairman Mao.

To walk you through what is now flying in the skies of China are: The before-mentioned Steve Trimble, our Senior Defense Editor. Graham Warwick, Aviation Week's Executive Editor for Technology. And London Bureau Chief Tony Osborne. I'm Robert Wall, Aviation Week's Executive Editor for Defense and Space, and your host for today.

Steve, maybe start us off and help explain to our listeners who maybe went into news detox over the holiday what we know about these two new aircraft. What are they called? What is their role? And what do we know? And what don't we know? Okay, yeah, sure. And Happy New Year to everybody out there. I think the best way to start describing this is to kind of go through it chronologically.

So you mentioned December 26, Boxing Day in the UK, where you are, and Chairman Mao's birthday in China. Around 4 p.m. China time, the Chinese social media just sort of lit up with imagery and videos of a new aircraft that we have not seen before in flight alongside a J-20S chase plane.

over a populated area, which is sort of assessed to be Chengdu, just because of the proximity and the presence, really, of the J-20S chase plane. And this was quite an interesting aircraft. And Graham will go into all the nitty-gritty of the technical details, but in broad strokes,

It's a tailless aircraft. It's got a Delta Diamond wing configuration. And most interestingly, perhaps, it's a trijet, three engines with one inlet positioned on top of the aircraft and two on the belly sort of spaced around a fairly large weapons bay.

So that was the first aircraft. And as we were sort of reeling from that, you know, because those images started actually appearing at 4 p.m. in China, it's 3 a.m. here. And I was getting hip to all this as I was waking up very abruptly the day after Christmas. And, you know, after a few hours of this, something else started appearing, another aircraft that

that we also had not seen before. And it was also a tailless configuration based on the chase plane, a Xinyang fighter. We thought this one probably comes from the Xinyang Aircraft Research Institute. And instead of being a trijet, this was a twin jet. It had a configuration not unlike that of, say, the YF-23, the Northrop Grumman YF-23.

and had other unique features that, again, we hadn't seen before.

All of this comes as China increasingly is flexing its military modernization muscle, especially with its air power, among many other domains. But it's been quite breathtaking to see since 2004, really, when China committed to the strategic Air Force concept and the reforms of the People's Liberation Army Air Force and

What that modernization has produced has been kind of jaw dropping every few years or so. We see something new that we just have never seen before. And the pace of that and the scope of it is nothing short of impressive, no matter how you look at it.

And now another important part of this progression is that you could always sort of knock the Chinese Air Force for being a bit copycat-ish. So if you saw the J-10 back in the day and you said, well, maybe that looks a bit like the Israeli Lavi fighter, you were probably right and there was probably a reason for that.

And if you looked at the J-20, you know, and you saw something that, you know, kind of looked like a McCoy and MiG-144 plan form modified with some stealth features that it seems that they borrowed pretty heavily from the F-35 with the inlets, especially those forward fuselage chines, that nose area.

And then the J35 itself, which is a carbon copy, let's just say it bluntly, of the F-35 except with two engines and probably some other internal modifications. But looked at from the outside, the configuration is almost exactly the same. This time, though, we're seeing something that we really haven't seen before.

So that's the real progression that we're seeing. It's not just in aircraft. We're seeing it with the Chinese are doing in space, also with UAVs. They're innovating, they're creating, and that is a new step. Albeit, maybe not necessarily pushing the state of the art beyond what the concepts in the West have already been looking at and demonstrating for some time.

It's still another step in their progression that should be noted. In addition to their just the speed of which they've been progressing and the capacity of their industry to keep up with all these requirements and new demands. So I will stop there and let you take it again.

Yeah. Thanks, Steve. And we'll talk about, obviously, missions and potential purposes and how far advanced these systems are in development in a bit. But Graham, maybe you can kind of unpack for us a bit what you found are some of the more interesting features. And maybe we start with the TriJet A because it's the TriJet and also because of its size. It's quite a significant, it looks like quite a significantly sized vehicle. So I'll pick up the story from a

from Steve and I woke up at four in the morning to these pictures because I'm a more normal person than Steve, right? So four o'clock is more normal than three o'clock.

It's all relative. It's all relative. So you open the pictures and, you know, other than the, you know, it's tailless and it's a big, you know, delta diamond shape, what really hits you is size, right? You know, it's big in comparison to the J-20S chase plane and it has tandem main gear, twin nose gear tandem main gear, which is generally a size of a heavy, a sign of a heavy aircraft, right? So it's...

If you take a look at the Sukhoi Su-34 fighter bomber, it's got tandem gears. It's about 25% heavier than the Su-27 on which it's based. So it goes from single gear to twin gear because it's a lot more weight and cost. And the aircraft just looks big.

I mean, most of the analysis, I didn't do any trying to guess length or anything like that, but most of the analysis, it's about the size of an F-111 in terms of spread, wingspan, length of airplane. It's at least that size, physical size. It's probably heavier, but it's in that size range. It's a big airplane, right?

So you sort of, you have a look at this and you go, wow, that's a big airplane. And then you go, hang on a minute, that's an inlet on the top and an inlet on the bottom. And then you realize it's, and there was a lot of debate for a while because we were going back and forward on teams. Is it three engines or is it three inlets for two engines and all that sort of thing? And then, of course, the picture came out of it on the runway and there you've got three YF-23 style trench nozzles along the trailing edge, all looking the same, same

So there's speculation the middle engine's a different type of engine, but the nozzles all look exactly the same. So assume it's three engines at the same time. So you then start asking the questions. You know, you look at the shape and you think stealth, right? There's no vertical tails. It's just got, in essence, three edges, you know, onto the platform, three angles on the platform.

Got a big flat bottom, you know, a big weapons bay. Instead of tails, it has these split rudders, redundant split rudders on the wingtips. They're open all the way through the pictures that we see because it's low speed, the wheels are down, they're open and they do yaw control instead of the vertical tails.

The other controls look fairly standard. There's some signs on the outboard pair of engines that the lower, because if you think about what a YF23 nozzle looks like, it's a trench, long lower panel, short upper panel. If you look at the bottom of the presumed Chengdu design, there are air gaps like there are on the control surfaces, which suggests those lower panels may move.

which would help with control of an airplane like that that's got all of the control surfaces at the back and the center of gravity and everything. So it needs fairly powerful controls to get that thing to actuate. The other interesting thing is the top inlet is very different to the bottom inlet. The top inlet is kind of in keeping with the upper surface, which is basically featureless. It's very like a B-2, B-21. There's little surface features on the top.

you know, obviously the look down radar suggests low altitude penetration. Everything's underneath. It has these correct style inlets, very like an F22 inlet, just plain angled surfaces. As far as we can tell, and somebody can disagree with me, there's no sign of what they call a DSI, a divertilous supersonic inlet, which is a hump in the middle of the inlet that gets rid of the slow moving air without having to create a sort of a slot that the air would go into. And that's a slot that would create

that would create an edge for radar. And also the hump helps disguise whatever's further down the inlet. There's no sign of that on the bottom. There may be on the top. We don't know, but...

They're very different. So, you know, the question then swirls around. It's a big airplane. It's clearly, you know, an F-111, the SU-24 are about 100,000 pounds. This thing's heavier than that, right? This thing's maybe 120,000 or something. So, you know, I mean, three engines. If you look at J-20, J-20's got two WS-10 engines, right?

It's about 82,000 pounds. If this thing's 120,000 pounds, it's 50% heavier, which means it needs three of them with WS10s. So it kind of makes sense. It's logic. If they don't have a bigger engine, use three of them. It also offers up some possibilities for how you use that third engine. You may just use it for takeoff and shut it down for cruise, which is what the Martin XP-51 bomber back in the 50s did. It had two engines under the forward fuselage and one tucked in the tail.

Once it got off the ground, the inlet rolled over, closed off, that engine shut down. You never used it again until you came around to land. This thing may do the same thing, or it may be there are other things that, you know, having three engines. There's no size to different engine. You know, there was some early speculation it could be a different type of engine that would give it to it, but it just looks like three of the same engine.

Okay, so there I am at four o'clock and as Steve says, I'm on my third, like him, I'm on my third cup of coffee and the next one pops up. Well, this is very different stuff. The pictures are really, I mean, we have very little to go on with this thing. The very first image looks like somebody's throwing a porpoise out of an airplane, basically. It's so poor.

But then they gradually get better and better, you know, and there's only about three of them, right? It's a very unusual airplane. I think if we saw it from a different viewpoint, we'd think it very, very differently. We'd be puzzled over this airplane over and over again. Because I think if you look at it from above, it looks like a lot of the NGAD aircraft

concepts that we've seen out of the US. Basically, a rear set, what they call lambda wing, with a lifting forward fuselage, as Steve says, like an YF-23 forward fuselage sticking out. But then instead of a trapezoidal wing on the F-23, it has what they call a lambda wing, which is basically a swept wing with this big triangular section inboard that gives it this

So then there's all sorts of speculation. Did that triangular, was that really the fins folded down in normal flight? Would they fold up for takeoff and landing, you know, which gives it vertical directional stability? No idea. The latest images, which have clearly been AI enhanced, suggest it's just straightforward trailing edge devices on those and there's nothing fancy going on there. There's something weird going on at the wingtips. We can't tell what's going on at the wingtips. There's lots of

lumps and bumps going on at the wingtips. Maybe drag rudders. They may be something else. But when looked at from the bottom, it's very weird. It's very weird for a few reasons. The inlets look kind of strange. They're like squared off Dassault Rafale inlets. They're triangular and they're tucked up against the fusel, really up against the forebody. So they have a kind of triangular inlet and slightly swept.

They're quite big, two engines in the back, which appear to have like F-22 styles, vectoring nozzles with the upper and lower panels that move in concert.

it has this big channel down the middle of it where the weapons bay is on the Chengdu design, on the Shenyang design. There's a big channel down the middle where you put a weapons bay. There are flat sections either side of that channel that could be weapons bay, but that same area is where the inlet trunking goes. It's where the landing gear goes. And then this aeroplane

It's got single landing gear. It looks about the size of the chase plane, which is a J-16, so it's a smaller airplane. Also, if you think supersonicly, if the thing is supersonic,

All of the area is concentrated in the middle of the aeroplane. Everything comes together. The engines, the trunking, the bays, the whatever's in there, all comes together, and it looks really fat in the middle. And that's not good for a supersonic aeroplane. So there's some oddness about this aeroplane that has us questioning. And also, the Chengdu aeroplane looks quite mature. It has sensor windows. It has dielectric panels. There are various lumps and bumps that look like sensor mounts.

It could be that the Shenyang airplane is just not as mature. It could be subscale. It could be a prototype. It could be a very different mission, but we have so little good imagery on the Shenyang one that it's easier to make deductions about Chengdu than it is about Shenyang. It's a puzzle at the moment.

Yeah, very interesting. And I mean, do you think it could be something related to a kind of CCA development, except that, you know, for now it's flying crude or does that really not help? I'm not even sure we can say it's flying crude because none of the images kind of show it from an angle that can see the cockpit. So we don't know what's up there. And even if we see a bump, it might be a sacrament in it.

One of the interesting things about, again, it's quite fun living through the moments when these things first. I've never really done this before or haven't done it in a long time in my career. When the first pictures of the Chengdu design came out, we looked and said, is that a single seat cockpit? Is that a tandem cockpit? Because it's a big black area. It's quite an extensive area of black space.

for an airplane of that size. But you just think, but when you get to the, it's a very broad fuselage at the front. When you get to the very later images, you can start to see the detail and it's kind of like, it looks like an F-111 or an Su-34 side-by-side cockpit, basically. But you only get that as the images kind of get processed and the definition gets bruised. The Shenyang winds, we still don't know.

It looked at from above, we'd be saying that's an NGAD type of a, that's a sort of a six gen fighter because it has that very, you know, clean, like looked at from the bottom, it's a mess underneath. Right. Tony, you also, I mean, pretty early on, we're saying it, you know, really reminded you of the SU-34 configuration, the Chengdu one. Talk to us about, I mean, you were also struck by the size, obviously, of the vehicle. Yeah.

Yes, not to sort of perhaps niggle with Graham being the Waracle and everything, but I have to say it looks a lot bigger than even an F-111. When you actually look at the dimensions of the F-111 with the J-20, there's not much difference between the F-111 and the J-20. And this is significantly bigger than a J-20. I mean, so again, like Graham, I was woken up by Steve's team's messages on Boxing Day, having had Christmas Day the day before and sort of looking at the images of this.

And it's really interesting actually how better images of the Chengdu aircraft have come as the day goes by. As an aircraft photographer, if I'd taken a really good shot of it, my shot would have been on the internet really quickly.

But actually, the quality of the images has improved in the last few days. It's quite interesting how that maybe that's been massaged out so far. So we really have the very small, tiny low-res images taken from mobile phones. And then it seems to have improved ever so slightly as the days have gone by. We've got ever slightly higher or improved quality images. I wonder how that's being influenced by the powers that be in Beijing. Yeah.

But no, the thing that struck me about this aeroplane was the physical size, that landing gear, the physical width of the front of the fuselage. So it's quite clear this is tandem cockpit. So it's almost like an SU-34, but in a different body. So you've got that same landing gear. Side by side, tandem is one behind the other.

Side-by-side seating, apologies. Me, Oracle, me, Oracle. Yeah, you're the Oracle. So yeah, side-by-side seating, which is obviously very unusual, but obviously we've seen it in the F-111 and we've seen it in the SU-34. And the other thing that struck me, as Graham said, was this very large nose and also the sort of various dialectical panels that go around it. And then in some other shots from the underside, you could see an enormous weapons bay.

So it makes you think, well, hang on, maybe this is going to have a tactical sort of role, sort of what in China would be referred to as a JH platform. And I think the US sort of intelligence community has previously referred to a program called JHXX to replace the JH7 aircraft that is a fighter bomber, a role that is still considered quite a crucial capability in China.

So this might fit that fighter bomber capability. But when you have such an enormous nose, you think that's going to be a big AESA radar. That's going to put out a lot of power. So maybe that then brings you to the thought, well, maybe you want free engines because you want to produce a hell of a lot of electrical power to power lots of aircraft.

electrical sensors on board the airplane because if you look at sixth generation programs in Europe and certainly here in the UK, they are talking about the electrical power being one of the key elements of the design and maybe that's one of the features of having a free engine platform and that would then allow you to put an enormous AESA radar in the nose. You've got basically a greenfield site to put in potentially an enormous sensor in there.

And with that bay, you might be thinking of weapons like the PL-17, which is essentially a flying telegraph pole,

of an air-to-air missile that would then sort of unleash hell out to ranges where AWACS or tankers might be operating. So this could be a sort of AWACS killer, tanker towline killer as a secondary role, perhaps. So, yeah, that was my gut feeling. I think this is going to have a very, I think there's going to be a mixed role for this, maybe secondary air-to-air, primary sort of tactical, you know, long-range attack,

A bit like the F-111, but with that secondary air-to-air role. And I think on the Shenyang, again, I think as Graham says, the pictures of it are so uncertain. Maybe Shenyang has less of a spotter community, but I would say maybe a sixth generation demonstrator at best. Very early days on that one. I think we'd need to start seeing some of the JH quality aircraft pictures to start making some real summations on that one.

I'm just curious, really for all of you guys, but the Chengdu design in particular, really interesting. And as Graham pointed out, in a way it looks far more mature and perhaps something, you know,

Where would you guys think? Where do you think it is in the maturity level? Is it a demonstrator? Is it in production, near production? How near term is it? And perhaps the other question a lot of people here are asking or have been asking is, as much as we all admit that these terms, fourth gen, fifth gen, sixth gen are marketing terms, we do equate them with certain features. And sixth gen is

of LO, low observability beyond what we have now in F-22 and F-35, and perhaps particularly notably in areas that aren't just RF. So I'm just kind of, what do you guys, how do you guys judge where the Chinese are with this? Could I just jump in briefly? I mean, I don't know if my colleagues would agree with me, but I think that this is a tactical bomber, whereas a lot of the initial targets

sort of analysis of this was this is a sixth generation fighter prototype. Are we in agreement or are we in disagreement? It's not a fighter. I mean, you know, so I talked to Daryl Cummings, who was the chief configuration designer on the YF-23. And there are many features of that airplane that are both airplanes that kind of come from that thing. And he pointed out that inlet above the airplane doesn't function above the

10 degrees of angle of attack. It's not a fighter, right? As soon as you pitch that airplane up, that inlet is ineffective. I strongly suspect that inlet closes down, you know, in cruise. And then you have a completely featureless, essentially featureless upper surface if you're going to go be a penetrating counter air type fighter. Maturity...

Here's the thing. The more you look at the Chengdu airplane, the less advanced it looks. That's kind of a weird thing to say. But there are some aspects of this airplane that are very, very fifth or four and a half generation in a fifth stroke, six generation shape. It's as if there are some aspects of this design that are very mature. They've just said, let's just we know how to do that.

Let's go forward because we've got this really weird shape and we need to make it work. But to me, it's a very mature design. There are actually little, you can't see them, but there are actually little boxes on the sides of the fuselage, which clearly there are going to be sensor mounts. You don't get that on a demonstration. You don't get that even in early prototypes. And you don't get your side dielectric panels or your EOTS windows in an early prototype. This thing is either a late prototype or pre-production or something like that, but it's a mature design.

I can try to fill in some of the time elements that we have for the Chinese modernization projects. So we know the Pentagon's China Military Power Report that they submit annually to Congress projects that the age 20 should enter service by the end of the decade. I guess I'd be a little surprised if this could beat the age 20 at this point.

We do know that China has been talking about developing a new fighter for several years. The Chengdu chief designer, Wang Haifeng, said in an interview, and I think it was about four or five years ago, that he expected that China would introduce a new fighter before 2035. And I know there is some dispute here about the terminology we're using between fighter and what do you call this, multi-role aircraft technology.

You know, that kind of thing. But I do think and also those Pentagon reports and the Defense Intelligence Agency has also been saying since 2019 that China is working on a fighter bomber, a medium range fighter bomber. And so if you put all those together, I think there's probably some combination between what the Pentagon is calling a fighter bomber and what the Chinese are calling a next generation fighter.

So, and those might be analogous to what we've seen coming out of Chengdu. You know, let's put the Xinyang aircraft aside for one moment because of the questions about that. But I think that timeframe is,

Is worth thinking about. Now, it's possible China isn't trying to be quite as technologically ambitious as as as the US. So maybe they can shrink that that time frame down because they're not trying to be quite so clever, especially with emission systems, which is really where this stuff gets really, really difficult.

So we don't – and obviously with the flight controls, you can see they've taken some shortcuts with that top-mounted inlet, whereas the Air Force, U.S. Air Force program, I mean, I'm guessing is looking at something that is much more svelte and conducive of next-generation offensive counter-air, penetrating counter-air-type missions. So –

So that's, you know, I guess that's just one way to think about it. And as far as the role itself, you know, I think it's interesting that the only quasi confirmation that has come from the Chinese government or some kind of official source in the Chinese government came from a video that we saw on New Year's Eve that was posted by the Nanjing based Eastern Theater Command.

that showed, I mean, it had a lot of different images of the Chinese forces in the Eastern Theater Command doing all their things for the past year. But then there was an image that they just showed very briefly that showed a ginkgo leaf next to this bird, this cartoon bird. The cartoon bird looked exactly like the configuration of the Shenyang aircraft. And the ginkgo leaf, there's definitely a similarity there.

a resemblance anyway, to the Chengdu aircraft. And Eastern Theater Command, it's important to note, really has the assignment for Taiwan. They're opposite Taiwan. And so it's interesting that of all the theater commands, they're the ones who acknowledge the aircraft or sort of quasi-acknowledge the aircraft.

When you think about the Taiwan scenario, there's a lot of defensive counter error activity that they would probably be engaged in. One would think that the first thing China would do is obliterate all the runways in Taiwan. So there shouldn't be too much offensive counter error, but a lot of defensive counter error. But then they want to neutralize probably U.S. reinforcements and other types of reinforcements coming out of the second island chain.

And Guam is 1,600 nautical miles away from China's eastern coast. So you need an aircraft. If you're going to address that threat and neutralize it, you're going to need an aircraft that can cover that in combat radius and get back. So probably a 4,000 nautical mile range aircraft at least in order to do that mission. That's a very big aircraft. And that's what we're seeing with the Chengdu configuration.

So, I mean, these are all inferences and I admit this is very speculative, but you can kind of see where all this sort of fits together a little bit based on what we know right now.

If you go back to the two airplanes that the US studied but didn't go forward with, the FB-22 and the FB-23, the FB-23 was actually called a regional bomber. And it was based on the YF-23, but it was quite a bit bigger. If you kind of run the numbers on those, you start to get, in terms of like fuel volume and range and payload capability,

you start to get closer to what the Chengdu airplane is. You know, these are, you know, those were, they were based on existing time. They were considerably scaled up. And, you know, and I think that regional bomber, which is not really talked about as a role anymore, but it was at the time, is kind of where I think this thing fits, you know. Yeah.

I mean, one thing I wanted to ask is, you know, a friend of mine was joking, the people who were really releasing these images were bullying Lockheed just to give NGAD new life. But joking aside, I mean, how do you think this will impact conversations in both about, you know, NGAD, FAXX, I guess, and you've got GCAP here, for example, in the UK with the Italians, right?

and the Japanese. So, I mean, does this meaningfully change the conversation or perhaps not so much? Potentially, but just to give readers a refresh on where things stand, NGAD was supposed to go to a contract award. The Air Force said,

the Air Force leadership started having second thoughts about the configuration that they chose, the requirements that they have, and their other priorities. And so they've got to address those things. But sometimes when you see when the public and Congress sees this other thing and they ask, well, what do we have?

Maybe that can change some things and drive some changes in the Air Force's thinking. But at the moment, the Air Force leadership is pretty fixed on this idea that this approach that they adopted for next generation air dominance, and it looks kind of similar to how, you know, relatively speaking to how China's looking at their next generation aircraft requirements.

that U S air force anyway, uh, really a second thoughts about whether that's a good idea. And the sort of the built to last concept is the air force chief of staff has put it, uh, should, should give way to this built to adapt concept, which is going to be much smaller aircraft, much cheaper aircraft, not quite disposable, but, uh, what they call a tradable or something a little bit more than that. Um,

Something that you can adapt over time and that you're not stuck with for decades, like we are with the legacy fighters that we have. If you're a big airplane groupie, it's great. So if you're in the GCAP crowd who want to build a fighter the size of a TSR-2, it's good news. And arguably, almost sort of nicely timed as well to confirm those ideas.

put that push to try and get g cap or probably on contract by the end of the year if you think that this will probably be five years away from being you know entering service although i'm not convinced this aircraft is going to certainly looking at the shendu design i mean do we think that he's going to be purchased in vast numbers and are they going to be aimed at targets like japan or as you say like the the multiple island chains

Well, and this is the thing that is so hard to kind of get our head around is just so much is going on in the Chinese defense industry and particularly with military aircraft. And actually, I mean, not even just that. I mean, satellites and spacecraft and hypersonics and all that kind of stuff. But but also just in aviation. I mean, it's incredible. Right. I mean, they've got these programs. They've got a huge production program going with J-20s, J-15s, J-16s, J-35s.

Still J-10s. They've got WS-10s, WS-15s engines in production. They're redefining how they do airlift at the same time, producing Y-20s. They've got this whole new concept of logistics that they're trying to do. Meanwhile, we also saw the KJ-3000 on the same day. This is a Y-20 fitted with an AWACS radar on December 26th. We saw pictures of that for the first time as well.

They've shown all these other kinds of crazy concepts. And, you know, it's hard to know how much of that is actually real in terms of a funded program with requirements and all that. But, I mean, they've been really cranking this stuff out. I haven't even mentioned the UCAS programs, GJ11, CS5000T, FH97. I mean, it just goes on and on. So it's really amazing. Whereas the U.S. military is thinking, well, do we take that money that

money for the Air Force, do we give it to B-21 to accelerate the ramp? Do we give it to INGAD to get it going? Or do we give it to something like INGAL? So we could have, or INGAS, the Next Generation Mobility Concept for more tankers and next generation airlifters.

And we're trying to decide which ones we pick, whereas China seems to be this everything, both and rather than either or. And I don't know how sustainable that is for their industry, where they get all the materials they need and the manpower. They do have a lot of manpower, but still, it takes a lot of quality to come up with this kind of stuff.

So, yeah, I mean, that's the thing that, you know, the conversation is very different and it keeps evolving in very unexpected ways like this. I kind of knew this was coming. We knew they were working on Next Generation Fighter, whether it's tactical or bomber. But I didn't even mention age 20. That's also coming down the line as well.

Well, a year's worth of CzechSIG's podcasts on the Chinese aerospace modernization efforts alone. Well, thanks, guys. Let's wrap it here. As Steve mentioned, we've got other things to look forward to if we look at China's military air power, H-20 pictures at some point probably this year, we'll see. So thanks. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Graham. Thanks, Tony. And thanks to our producer, Guy Fernau.

And also thank you to our listeners for your time. And don't miss out on being the first person in the new year to leave us a five-star rating on your favorite podcasting app. And don't forget to tune in for our next CheckSix podcast. Thank you very much.

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