The new Chengdu demonstrator.
Via Justin Bronk
In fewer than 24 hours on Thursday, two Chinese airplane-makers revealed new stealth fighter demonstrators. And not just any demonstrators. The separate designs from airframers Chengdu and Shenyang may be among the most sophisticated manned fighters ever.
The Chinese military traditionally reveals major new technology at the end of the Western calendar year in December or January. Perhaps most famously, the People’s Liberation Army allowed the first images of Chengdu’s J-20 stealth fighter to circulate online in January 2011. Thirteen years later, there could be hundreds of J-20s in front-line service with the PLA Air Force.
This year’s surprise was among the most dramatic for the PLA’s public relations machine. Around the same time on Thursday, videos appeared online depicting two different manned stealth fighter demonstrators in flight. The Chengdu model had a J-20 escort. The Shenyang type flew alongside a Shenyang-made Sukhoi Su-27 clone.
Both new types are tailless deltas. Their wings and all control surfaces appear to be in the same horizontal plane. That can reduce a fighter’s radar signature—but at a cost. “Such vehicles are known to be aerodynamically complex aircraft with distinctive flight dynamic characteristics and intricate flight control laws,” a team wrote in a 2007 report for the U.S. Air Force Flight Test Center.
It’s apparent the PLAAF is determined to acquire an extremely stealthy fighter with complex flight controls—and it isn’t taking any chances. The air force’s two major fighter-makers are both working on designs. One could succeed where the other fails and still deliver an important wartime capability.
The Chinese military took the same approach with its first generation of stealth fighters. Chengdu’s twin-engine, supersonic J-20 worked as designed—and the PLAAF ultimately ordered a large number. But if the J-20 had failed, there was an alternative: the lighter Shenyang J-35, which first flew in 2012 and may yet enter front-line service as a navy carrier fighter.
The Thursday reveal was momentous, but it was partly a marketing triumph. It’s worth noting that the U.S. Air Force tested what was likely a tailless fighter demonstrator back in 2020 as part of its troubled Next Generation Air Dominance program. “NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world,” Will Roper, then the head of Air Force acquisitions, said at the time.
Where the USAF has hidden its new stealth fighter demonstrator, the PLAAF has proudly showed off both of its own new demonstrators. What happens next depends on how well the demonstrators actually work under the stress of hard use in a real-world context—and how many billions of dollars Beijing is willing to invest in one or both designs.
Either or both demonstrators could become multi-role fighters with serious air-to-air capability. But they might also function as stealthy ground-attack planes. “The PLAAF is developing new medium- and long-range stealth bombers to strike regional and global targets,” the Pentagon noted in the latest edition of its annual report on the Chinese military.
The long-range stealth bomber, the Xi’an H-20 flying wing, is still in development and may not appear in public for another few years. The medium-range stealth bomber, the so-called JH-XX, has been more of a mystery.
Could Thursday’s surprise demonstrators evolve into medium bombers? It’s possible.