Just a nice photo of a J-16 in primer
China Flanker Thread III (land based, exclude J-15)
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
by78
General
Niiiiiiiice, thanks!!A few more.
edit: 0801 S/N on the intake side, my guess is that these pictures are from early 2022 and not recently
On closer inspection. There seems to be some black regions on the left LERX, note the patch at the very tip that goes onto the side of the nose and have some weird uneven edges. I wonder what those are, since from my memory those haven’t been on any other flanker.
They will always use past photos to make up the number, the Zhuhai Air Show shows that batch 9 and batch 10 have been in service
Probably RAM.
Maybe, but that’s such a small area… wouldn’t they be covering a major part (or the entirety of the airframe) with RAM coating for tests?
The sharp curved edges of the LERXes probably present particularly strong or difficult to control reflections. I don’t think the application of RAM here is just for testing. These are specific RCS reduction treatments for the production plane. You can’t turn a non stealth optimized airframes into stealthy airframes with just RAM but there are sometimes very obvious and easy wins to get meaningfully better RCS results, and a lot of those will be along sharp edges and corners present on the plane. If you look closely you’ll see the leading edges of the wings and tails also have some black edge treatments.