China Shows Off J-20 Stealth Fighter At Country’s Biggest Expo

For the first time, China showed its Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter in public on Tuesday as it opened the biggest meeting of aircraft buyers and makers with a show of its military power.

In the southern city of Zhuhai, Airshow China provides Beijing an occasion to display its ambitions in civil aerospace. Moreover, the country gets to highlight its developing capability in defense. China is primed to surpass the U.S. as the world’s foremost aviation market in the next decade.

Two J-20 jets zoomed over luminaries, industry executives and hundreds of spectators assembled at the show’s opening ceremony. The flypast barely exceeded a minute. The jets produced a deafening roar that the crowd greeted with applause and gasps. It also triggered car alarms in a parking lot.

Planespotters first saw the J-20 in 2010. Experts say China has been polishing designs in the hope of reducing a military technology gap with the United States. As China takes a more assertive stance in Asia, President Xi Jinping has pressed to reinforce the armed forces, specifically in the South China and East China seas.

“It is clearly a huge step forward in Chinese combat capability,” said Aviation Week’s Bradley Perrett, a veteran China watcher.

Further, state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) was confident on China’s appetite for new civilian planes. The company projected that the market would necessitate 6,865 new aircraft worth $930 billion over the next 20 years.

The COMAC forecast – comparable to long-term viewpoints from well-established rivals Airbus Group and Boeing Co – said China would contribute almost a fifth of worldwide demand for almost 40,000 planes over the next two decades.

After screaming onto the Zhuhai stage as a pair at low-level, one of the J-20s quickly vanished over the distance. It left the other to perform a series of turns, baring its delta wing shape against bright sub-tropical haze.

It was China’s second consecutive demonstration of stealth at the biennial show, after the 2014 debut of the J-31.

J-20 capabilities remain vague

However, experts said the fleeting and relatively cautious J-20 routine, wherein the pilots did not perform low-speed passes or open weapon bay doors, answered few questions.

“I think we learned very little. We learned it is very loud. But we can’t tell what type of engine it has, or very much about the mobility,” said Asia Managing Editor of FlightGlobal Greg Waldron. “Most importantly, we didn’t learn much about its radar cross-section.”

A crucial question is whether the new Chinese fighter can equal the radar-evading properties of Lockheed’s F-35, the latest strike jet in the U.S. arsenal, or the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor air-to-air combat jet. The F-22 is the J-20’s closest lookalike.

But the mere exhibition of such a newly created aircraft was a telling signal, others said.

Sam Roggeveen, a senior fellow at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute said that it’s a shift in tactics for the Chinese to openly show off weapons that aren’t in full squadron service yet. It shows a lot of confidence in their ability, and also a lot of pride.

 

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