China develops stealth fighter prototype
Image via WikipediaChina appears to have completed a prototype of its first stealth fighter, highlighting Beijing's military modernisation drive, but experts said Wednesday the jet will not be operational for years to come.The one picture I saw looked more like an F-16 than a stealth fighter. China is still having trouble developing advanced fighter engines and is still having to buy them from the Russians. That makes the deployment date indicated look pretty speculative at this point.
Photographs published online and Chinese military sources cited by the Japanese media indicate a test model of the J-20 fighter has been finished, with taxi tests carried out last week at an airfield in southwestern China.
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Experts say the J-20 will eventually rival the US Air Force's F-22, the world's only fully operational next-generation stealth fighter jet -- but not any time soon.
The J-20 "will become fully competitive with the F-22, in capability and perhaps in numbers, around the end of this decade," Rick Fisher, an expert on the Chinese military at the International Assessment and Strategy Centre, a US think tank, told AFP.
Dennis Blasko, an expert on the People's Liberation Army -- the world's largest military force -- said the timeline for development of the jet was "probably considerably longer than what most outside observers would estimate".
China plans to begin test flights of the J-20 as soon as this month, with plans to deploy the jet as early as 2017, Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper said, quoting Chinese military sources.
The fighter will be equipped with large missiles and could reach the island of Guam, a US territory in the western Pacific, with aerial refuelling, although it would take 10 to 15 more years to develop technology on a par with that of the US F-22, it said.
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Here is the Wall Street Journal's take on the aircraft:
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