Is there any indication/rumor that those DSI bumbs house side radars?
J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VIII
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
Probably not.
The grey J-20 has a silver collar on its engine. It looks like WS-10C2.
The yellow primer J-20 though... the engine is mostly hidden, but its shaping sort of vaguely suggests its might be WS-15. I suppose combined with credible rumours it could be taken as a WS-15 unit.
With how high priority any stealth fighter is at the moment (including around the world, given how so few nations have them) would it really make sense to relegate even the oldest J-20s to mere training? These (serial) airframes are at most 10 years old, after all.
I suppose they could be given time as training units while preserving combat capabilities (to be activated quickly) for if a conflict arises suddenly, rather than be permanently shunted into a training role.
The US has a few of non-combat coded F-22 in training brigades, those were mostly the oldest production, and I believe some of the LRIP aircraft as well.
J-20 WS-10C already dominates J-20 AL-31 in exercises like Golden Helmet. Imagine how big a gap J-20A/S has with vanilla J-20 produced a decade ago. With the sheer number of fifth gen aircraft PLAAF is cranking out, they can afford to put the best steel where they are needed.
That said AL-31 J-20 can be invaluable in training fifth gen combat philosophy. There is already a huge combat philosophy change between 4.5th gen and 4th gen fighter pilots so imagine how bad it would be to switch from 4th gen to 5th gen. Better teach them the right habits rather than let them unlearn bad habits when they start performing interception missions in the East China Sea.
Don't forget they can always just... Create new brigades or whatever.
You need people to populate those brigades... Not just aircraft. I would go as far as say the biggest roadblock for PLAAF is getting enough trained pilots.
Those airframes are old though, at least twice as old as the oldest non-prototype J-20 airframe.
And besides, its the US that still holds quantitative advantage in stealth fighters (overall, as logistics constrains them for a localised Pacific conflict, but this is a malleable number). F-22 airframes would therefore have lower priority than J-20 airframes, not to mention its not even the main fighter the US expects to rely on for a Pacific conflict anymore due to its lack of modern 5th-gen capabilities (e.g., sensor fusion). The J-20 is still very much expected to be the main fighter for a Pacific conflict.
I had the same thoughts, and its not that I disagree. The real question is the magnitude of the difference. Is it worth sacrificing a few of the oldest and weakest airframes of the far-and-away superior generation of fighters (that are still useful in peer conflicts and likely dominant in all other conflicts) to be full-time trainers? And how many airframes?
I don't know if we'll ever get enough details to make that decision, but that's fine since its not our decision to make. But this is a good opportunity to get insight into PLA's thoughts on J-20. If we do see some combat-capable J-20s be relegated to full training even while total J-20 family numbers are 300-400 while F-35 is >1000, that suggests they feel confident enough in reducing some overall fleet capability today to train for greater capability a little later.
There's also the question of if the gap between AL-31 J-20 and WS-10C2/WS-15 J-20A is so great that habits learned on the former would be a detriment to just having a clean learning approach to the latter.
F-22 is the original sensor fusion aircraft. Granted, it's simpler type of one, but it is absolutely fused. It didn't really share with other aircraft, sure - but this is getting solved via several pods.