Ten years after its maiden flight, the Chengdu J-20 remains the world’s most enigmatic fighter.
On 11 January 2011, then-US defence secretary Robert Gates sat down with former Chinese premier Hu Jintao in Beijing to discuss ways to improve defence ties. Just hours before, images of the maiden flight of the J-20 had flooded China’s internet.
“This is about as big a ‘f*** you’ as you can get,” an aide told Gates, according to the former defence secretary’s memoir.
Gates’s team considered calling the high level meeting off altogether. Instead, he asked Hu directly about the test. The Chinese civilians in the room seemed shocked by the query. Apparently they were unaware of the milestone.
After several minutes of discussion in Mandarin among the Chinese delegation, Hu finally told Gates that the roll-out had been a “previously scheduled scientific test”. Gates, for his part, believed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would have given him a different explanation.
In this dramatic fashion the J-20 entered the fighter world’s central stage, where it has remained over the last decade. Aviation experts and amateurs alike pore over every photo that emerges of the iconic, twin-tailed type, noting fuselage numbers, design tweaks, and most importantly the J-20’s all-important engines. No other fighter has garnered the same aura of mystery. By comparison, the successes and failures of the Lockheed Martin F-35 are an open book.
In those early days of the J-20, what intelligence there was came from aviation enthusiasts near the Chengdu airfield where the type is produced. Video and photographs of matt black J-20s were frequently posted on China’s internet. Over the years, however, the steady stream of imagery and video from Chengdu has fallen off. This potentially relates to a tighter security environment in China in the era of Xi Jinping. Still, there are plenty of sightings from air bases around China and in satellite photos. The J-20 has also made some public appearances.
The first such appearance occurred in November 2016, when a pair of People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) J-20s conducted a brief flypast at the opening ceremony of Airshow China in Zhuhai. Their fleeting appearance was a major sensation, but in the vast AVIC display inside the show, there was not an image or model of the J-20 to be found. When asked about the J-20, AVIC officials, never prone to sharing much detail, frowned and looked away uncomfortably.
Two years later, four J-20s participated in the flying display. While the performance highlighted the type’s large size, there was a lack of aggressive manoeuvres, such as the falling leaf and tight vertical loops. At air shows, such manoeuvres are routine for the fighter to which, rightly or wrongly, the J-20 is most often compared: the US Air Force’s Lockheed F-22.
The 2018 Zhuhai show saw another first, with AVIC distributing a J-20 flyer with this brief description: “The J-20 developed independently by China is a heavy stealth fourth-generation fighter (aka fifth-generation internationally), renowned for its dominant role of medium and long-range air combat and excellent capability in ground and marine precision strike.”
But apart from the rare statement in China’s nationalist Global Times newspaper, there is little acknowledgment about the type.
Rod Lee, research director at the China Aerospace Studies Institute, believes there are three primary mission sets for the J-20. The first is destroying high-value airborne assets.
“The combination of a large combat radius with long-range air-to-air missiles and low visibility should enable J-20s to prosecute [airborne early warning and control/intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR)] aircraft, as well as tankers. Conceptually, the PLAAF talks about rolling back these high-value targets as being a major part of establishing air superiority. This is backed by semi-authoritative sources in AVIC, who suggest that J-20 is a platform that can ‘pierce the net’ for other aircraft.”
Supplemental mission sets include launching anti-radiation missiles and air-to-ground munitions at surface targets. The PLAAF believes stealthy aircraft are essential for prosecuting key nodes owing to the element of surprise. The last mission set Lee suggests is destroying other fighters in air-to-air engagements.
“The PLAAF does indeed like to tout the J-20’s manoeuvrability and air-to-air combat performance,” he says. “Given this, the PLAAF almost certainly will use the J-20 as an air superiority fighter against other fighters. But the PLA de-emphasises the importance of attrition warfare and instead advocates a ‘systems destruction’ approach. Killing individual adversary fighters (even in large numbers) is not as useful as killing [high value airborne assets] and key ground targets.”
That said, the J-20 fleet is still small. Andreas Rupprecht is an avid observer of Chinese military aviation, and author of Modern Chinese Warplanes, an authoritative guide to mainland airpower. According to Rupprecht, some estimates of J-20 strength put the overall number at 40-60 airframes, but he notes that only 20 examples have been confirmed.
Rupprecht highlights some of the frustrations in tracking the secretive J-20 programme. He points out that many observers believe prototypes and low-rate initial production (LRIP) examples powered by Russia’s Saturn AL-31FN engine should bear the simple J-20 designation, and later aircraft powered by the indigenous WS-10C Taihang should be designated J-20A. In their view, the J-20B designation should be reserved for J-20s powered with the advanced WS-15 Emei.
Rupprecht disagrees with this, basing his opinion on the designations used for China’s J-10 family. He feels prototypes should be designated J-20, while J-20A refers to LRIP examples powered by AL-31FNs, and J-20B to examples powered by WS-10Cs. If J-20 designations hold true to the protocol used with the J-10, he feels that WS-15-powered examples should actually be designated J-20C.
Based on photos of recent J-20s, he believes that since mid-2019 all factory-fresh examples use WS-10C engines, and that a WS-15-powered aircraft is in testing. He reckons that the WS-15 will take until 2025 to reach operational service, but that the WS-10C is nonetheless a major breakthrough in that it erodes Chinese dependence on Russian engines – sawtooth exhaust feathers distinguish the WS-10C from the Russian engine. As for the WS-15, estimates suggest that its maximum thrust will be 18.4t (180kN), potentially enabling ‘supercruise’, or the ability to fly at supersonic speed without maintaining the use of afterburners.
