China’s top aircraft designer has a vision of what the next Chinese jet fighter should look like. It sounds like a super F-35

by Michael Peck

“A revolutionary, cognition-subverting next generation fighter jet, characterized by long-range, high capabilities in penetration, awareness, firepower and fast decision-making, is about to come into being amid great power competition,” according to China’s state-controlled Global Times.

Global Times cited a technical paper written by Yang Wei, an aircraft designer at Aviation Industry Corporation of China – and the chief designer of the J-20 stealth fighter. With reports that China is planning to develop a next-generation stealth jet by 2035, the fact that Yang’s report is being cited in Chinese state media is significant.

“Citing foreign projects, Yang said that a future fighter jet will generally require a longer combat range, longer endurance, stronger stealth capability, a larger load of air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons, and the functionality to provide its pilot with easy-to-understand battlefield situation images and predictions,” Global Times noted. “In an integrated system, the aircraft should be able to form a network, draw real-time integrated situational images, create multiple attack routes, and transmit target information across mission areas in real time.”

“Yang's vision could indicate what China's future fighter jet might be like,” Global Times said.

Writing in the Chinese aeronautical journal Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica, Yang concluded that “in older generations of fighter jets, manoeuvrability used to be the deciding factor, but this concept is becoming outdated with the development of advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles with their beyond-visual-range attack capabilities,” according to Global Times. “Information has now become the deciding factor, as modern fighter jets focus on gaining more information with the help of AESA radars and data chains, while also reducing opponents' ability to gain information, including using stealth technology and electronic countermeasures.”

AI will also be crucial to assist pilots of manned fighters, Yang said. However, Yang did not mention purely autonomous fighters, despite the belief of some Western experts that unmanned warplanes are only a matter of time.

“China is eyeing to develop a next generation fighter jet by 2035 or earlier, which could feature laser, adaptive engines and the ability to command drones,” said Global Times.

What’s interesting isn’t what China’s next stealth fighter will be – but rather what it will not be. It won’t be like China’s Su-27s, Su-30s and Su-35s (or their made-in-China copies). Those are essentially Cold War designs that are designed to be highly manoeuvrable dogfighters, and which lack automation and datalinks.

The new fighter would seem closer to China’s J-20 stealth fighter, which apparently is a heavy aircraft with poor manoeuvrability and designed to launch long-range air-to-air missiles. But there is no evidence that it has the networking capabilities found in the latest Western aircraft, in which fighters continually exchange location and targeting data with other planes, ships and ground forces.

That kind of networking actually sounds like the U.S. F-22 stealth fighter, which is equipped with extensive datalink capability and can pick off targets at long range with its new AIM-120D air-to-air missiles. Except that the F-22 can be an extremely manoeuvrable dogfighter if need be.

Which leaves one other aircraft for China to model. The U.S. F-35 stealth fighter is not especially fast or manoeuvrable. In fact, if an F-35 engages in a close-range dogfight, then its pilot probably made a mistake. But the F-35 is expressly designed to be a highly networked aircraft with extensive automation, including a sensor fusion system that presents the pilot with integrated 360-degree situational awareness. The technology is still buggy for now, but it does fit Yang’s vision of what a next-generation Chinese fighter.

There are still issues with America’s fighter concept that China would have to address. The F-35 can either operate stealthily with a limited weapons load inside its internal bomb bay, or it sacrifice stealth to enter “beast mode” and haul more payload. Modern fighters also don’t tend to have the range of older aircraft like the F-4 Phantom, which leaves them with less time over the target or with more need for aerial refuelling.

Nonetheless, China is moving towards a more Western way of war that emphasizes sophisticated, expensive weapons that are designed to fight as part of a highly networked team.