There is a write-up about it in Air Power Australia, to be found here.♥ The view of the Air Power Australia analysts is that this is a superior machine, outmatching the F-18E/F and the upcoming F-35.
Any notion that an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or F/A-18E/F Super Hornet will be capable of competing against this Chengdu design in air combat, let alone penetrate airspace defended by this fighter, would be simply absurd. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet are both aerodynamically and kinematically quite inferior to the as presented J-XX/J-20 design, and even the shape based VLO capability in the J-XX/J-20, as presented, will effectively neutralise any sensor advantage either type might possess against earlier Russian and Chinese fighter designs.Which leads to the quote of note.
I would take this perspective with a salt mine. Air Power Australia's "analyses" tend to regard Middle Kingdom engineers as infallible and omnipotent, while F-35s and F-18s were, in their view, designed by children home for a sick day with a busted Etch-A-Sketch. They pine for the return of the almighty F-111 and endless flows of F-22s.♦ Their intentions may not be all bad, but their anlyses lack methodology, rigor, transparency, and most importantly the occasional result contrary to their agenda that is evidence of objective minds.I liked two parts of this, the first being "designed by children home for a sick day with a busted Etch-A-Sketch" and the second being "and most importantly the occasional result contrary to their agenda that is evidence of objective minds".♣
No attribution due to a non-attribution policy
Regards — Cliff
♠ The Peoples Republic of China, the Mainland, as opposed to that crowd on Taiwan (Formosa). In essence, Zhōngguó, the Middle Kingdom.
♥ NB: This file has a lot of pictures and a couple of videos and in its entirety it loads slowly.
♦ Australia operated the F-111C long past their retirement from the US Inventory. The last retired last month, December 2010. They have, in turn, been replaced by the Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet, to be replaced, in time, by the F-35.
♣ We all know which group that applies to; the Global Warming crowd that believes that anyone with a question is somewhere below the level of Holocaust Deniers.
4 comments:
The current rumor is that the engines are a bit on the puny side and the current estimated get well date for a bigger engine is 2017. They must be getting theirs from the same source as LM for the F-35, or perhaps the same provider used by Boeing for their troubled Dreamliner.
Having said that, the Chinese threat is credible and largely unexpected in its rapidity of debut. Coupled with the massive upstick in Chinese Navy construction and weapon system deployment to include aircraft carriers and nuke subs, only a dreamer absent effective pharmaceuticals can believe that their preparations are "merely defensive." The Chinese stealth will be able, with the assistance of AR be capable of reaching Anderson AFB, Guam with a full load of armament. Not good!!
China is of the opinion that the US is in rapid decline and have thus chosen "this moment in time" to "make an international move to dominance."
Unfortunately, the US has perhaps lost its capability for deterrance and will now have to seriously contemplate defense, never a good thing.
I'm not sure whether or not I'm ready to fear something on which the landing gear doesn't appear to be retractable.
Analysis heavy on hyperbole ("any notion that", "absurd") has always been suspect with me. I know I'm ignorant of the tech overall, but I couldn't find reason anywhere in the piece to support the assertions. Why would it be absurd? Does it fly faster? Corner better? Sport better decals?
That being said, I've always taken the lesson from our own Civil War, that the side with the more robust economy is always the side that wins. On that basis alone we're right to be concerned.
Just an editoril comment. It is quite common in the early phases of flight test to leave the landing gear down.
Croz has a point. The other thing is that that yellow circle you see on the surface looking from the tail is used as a drag chute and it is kept open to avoid problems with actuation, just like the gear. Keeping the number of variables on the first flight to a minimum. Nothing like a gear up landing to ruin a good day.
And, in fact, re the drag chute, given its location I thought, at first, it might be a "spin chute". The idea is that if the aircraft is in a spin (and thus not moving forward very fast to have the chute give a downward snap to break the stall if the test pilot can't. I think that in the past some have been forcibly ejected, as with a small mortar. Spin chutes are for the flight test only, although the F-4 used the normal landing drag chute if the aircraft got into a flat spin. I was lucky enough to never had to use that expedient.
Airplanes are a really interesting engineering subject—and fun.
Regards — Cliff
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