Photos and analysis of China's J-20 fighter as it nears first flight

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AeroFranz said:
I have seldom seen airplanes that started out with more fin area than the eventual final configuration.
i agree totally with you, i think the J-20 is an interceptor, wth good agility something of a stealthy Panavia Tornado or F-14.
The ventral fins must help it at high AoA because they are less susceptible to be blanketed by the fuselage and disturbed by the vortices shed by the canards and forebody chines.
 
According to an article on 4th Generation Fighters on the Chengdu website...

Currently, the fighter's development has entered its fourth generation. Development of the rising cost of fighters, no country has enough financial resources to be developed separately as before and used for air combat fighter attack aircraft against ground attack, but the two into one, the fighter designed a machine can, or more than one machine type, which is the fourth generation of advanced fighter aircraft design.

So it would seem fairly likely that the J-20 is a multirole fighter/attack design. Who'd have thunk it. Not a MiG-31 clone, not an Su-34-alike.

It might be good to lay off the armchair analysis for a bit and concentrate on what we actually know.
 
AeroFranz said:
I have seldom seen airplanes that started out with more fin area than the eventual final configuration.

To quote Ben Rich:

Aeroplanes are like people. They all gain weight and never have enough tail. ..
 
http://www.56.com/flashApp/56.10.12.03.c.swf?vid=NTc3MTU2MzE&ref=

Great vid, thanks rousseau :)
 
Nearly the same but slightly longer ..

http://www.56.com/flashApp/56.10.12.03.c.swf?vid=57716627&ref=forum.keypublishing.co.uk
 
overscan said:
To quote Ben Rich:

Aeroplanes are like people. They all gain weight and never have enough tail. ..
;D
 

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flumes are appearing and disappearing, and again appearing just in left nozzle
nozzles are wide open
I still think it's fake
 
Yes, but if You look closely there are two smaller - sharper boxes included ... one on the left and one above the left engine ...

But maybe it's just too much wishfull thinking and I should go to bed to get some sleep.

Deino
 

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I bet if it really flew (today), all Chinese forums would be out of order because of overload
 
flateric said:
I bet if it really flew (today), all Chinese forums would be out of order because of overload

Agreed again but ... but there are still rumours that the J-20 already flew ... and in mind of the not too visible mountains near CAC (at least in fog) this could be one, when it flew at the secret Dingxin AB ... (again just a rumour).

Deino

PS: I need some sleep !
 
>_< The Lord, please give to these poor, unfortunate Chinese people normal cameras, and punish those who shoot on a mobile. Amen
 
If the left canard (in the supposedly non-altered portion of the image) was not pixelated I might believe it was real, but the way is looks the aircraft was pasted in from a lower-res source photo. Compare with the leaves of the tree in the foreground and the ridge line in the background, I would expect them to show pixelation as well if the picture was real. The noise was probably added later in an attempt to hide the doctoring.
 
Jetto said:
>_< The Lord, please give to these poor, unfortunate Chinese people normal cameras, and punish those who shoot on a mobile. Amen

And tripods, don't forget those. Shaky cam is gettin' old.
 
Funny how incredulous people are. The latest issue of a Polish magazine 'Armia'(Army) features a report from the last-year Zhuhai air show by Tomasz Szulc. The writer, otherwise a very competent journalist specializing in East European and Asian military hardware, snubs at the 5th gen. cockpit mockup as a 'ripoff from the F-35', and suggests that the new plane is at best in the early design stage and will get airborne, if at all, in two years' time at the earliest. I guess that, like some forum members here, he will now have to take his words back.
Although it would be insane to doubt the existence in metal of the J-20, in a link provided by one of the forum members I found info on another Chinese stealth plane(J-16?), supposedly being developed by Shenyang: a single engine triplane with canards, tailplanes and forward-swept wings. Until photos of this plane emerge, it indeed remains dubious, however over a year ago I bought for( a good excuse ;)) my then one-year old son a Chinese-made toy model of the Grumman X-29. It had drawn my interest as normally these toys attempt to represent popular types, like the F-14, F-16, F-22 or recently, the F-35B. I know it's absurd to link a toy to an actual aircraft but logically, since only a handful of FSW designs have been flown, if this report is true, the Chinese must have analyzed previous attempts at this configuration. It is possible that they've sought a light, agile and cheaper counterpart of the heavy J-20 interceptor, following the American and Russian approach.
To conclude, skepticism is useful and desirable, as it eliminates a lot of BS. Still, when a skeptic refuses to acknowledge certain facts, only because they seem to contradict his knowledge/beliefs, he turns into an irrational doctrinaire. If the J-20 has been speed-taxiing for the last couple of weeks, is it not logical that it has eventually taken off? Montage, PS is always possible, but to me the J-20 first flight is highly probable.
 

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J-20 maiden flight looks successfully. ;D
 

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OMG! And what - this is other than made taxi tests? Where these white lines on top were before?
Congratulations then!
 
rousseau said:
J-20 maiden flight looks successfully. ;D
Now - after at least some sleep - it's me, who tend to say that's a CG !

Deino
 
saintkatanalegacy said:
yep, it's a cg.

just by looking at the nozzles

Really? How can you tell by just looking at the nozzles?
Why would an 3d-artist add lines to a plane that has none?
It doesn't make sense ...
 
Seems strange for it to take off with unreheated engines and yet nozzles fully open.
 
The Cg is obvious by the very odd uniform sculpting between the engine bays and the light on the nozzles would be far less uniform, yes theres a shadow over them but its still too uniform. Light scattering looks suspect over the entire airframe. The nozzles look too small nor correctly aligned nor well shaped for perspective.
 
Foxglove said:
Although it would be insane to doubt the existence in metal of the J-20, in a link provided by one of the forum members I found info on another Chinese stealth plane(J-16?), supposedly being developed by Shenyang: a single engine triplane with canards, tailplanes and forward-swept wings.

Designation J-16 was reported several times, mostly as the proposed stealthified variant of the J-11 http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,11459.0.html But for now, there is not any good information, so it is what it is - unconfirmed rumour. I personally take the idea of the FSW J-16 less likely, because FSW is still a too radical idea for the fighter. The future will show.
 
IIRC there was a PAK-FA that was CG'd by a chinese that had a similar nozzle rendering under V-ray

that's for reference ofc.
 
ubiquitous08 said:
The Cg is obvious by the very odd uniform sculpting between the engine bays and the light on the nozzles would be far less uniform, yes theres a shadow over them but its still too uniform. Light scattering looks suspect over the entire airframe. The nozzles look too small nor correctly aligned nor well shaped for perspective.

As was said sometime before: "We saw the CGI of the J-XX and now we are inpatiently waiting for the CGI of the first flight" :D What about the spotter guard around the airport? Are they still there? My hope was, that the (real) first flight will produce a lot of photos from the different angles, so it will be somehow easier to judge, if at least some of the images are genuine.
 
harrier said:
Seems strange for it to take off with unreheated engines and yet nozzles fully open.

Unless of course it isn't taking off but landing. Then again, as saintkatanalegacy says some of the yellow lines are wrong, for example the aileron hinges should extend out to the wing tips going by photos of the real deal.
 
There are some better pictures on this:

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-311210-1.html

Paul
 
pwagner said:
There are some better pictures on this:
exactly the same ones that were in this thread previously
Or they are becoming better quality after they appearing at APA?
 
smarties at Paralay's forum were fast to notice these familiar white lines on upper fuselage at higher quality "photo"
 

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flateric said:
smarties at Paralay's forum were fast to notice these familiar white lines on upper fuselage at higher quality "photo"

Yes, but that would mean that either Gao Shan (the artist of that CG) is the "Faker" or there is another one of his CG's - I only know two - and someone else "faked" them.

Deino
 
flateric said:
smarties at Paralay's forum were fast to notice these familiar white lines on upper fuselage at higher quality "photo"
i am trying to find paralay forum
does it have a new address?
 
Gaoshan made the CG...it wasn't meant to deceive people but apparently one of the people he showed it to thought it was funny to PS it and make it seem like a real first flight ::)
 
Fly or no fly- if it hasn't yet, it'll take to the air any moment now. Add to the J-20 the stealthified J-11, JH-7 and FC-1 in the pipeline, plus the cryptic Shenyang design, and God knows what else- that's something to look forward to. Go China!
 
PAK FA said:
i am trying to find paralay forum
does it have a new address?
http://paralay.iboards.ru/index.php
 
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