Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A Small Stealth Aircraft Update: J-20 And More



A couple of nifty pix here. The first is a quick and dirty guide to the different generations of aircraft. It ought to be noted that there are no European - as in nonRussian European - aircraft past Gen 4, and there are none currently planned. Europeans are working on stealthy drones like the US is, but no further manned aircraft.

The second is a lengthwise comparison of the three Gen 5 air superiority (assuming that is what the J-20 is) fighters. More and more pix of the T-50 are arising and its looking more and more that this first T-50 is not stealthy whatsoever. That would disqualify it from the Gen 5 category by itself. However, this T-50 prototype could be the equivalent of the YF-22: there were significant changes between the YF-22 and the F-22A. It could be that the Russians wanted to test fly their airframe design earlier than their composites tech would allow. The Soviets had a plan of test flying iterative improvements. Perhaps this is what the Russians are doing.

A bit of news is that India's equivalent of the F-35 has revealed itself a tad bit more. Read more here. It is in the very, very early stages and will take a while to be fielded. The Tejas took over twenty years to go from the stage that the AMCA is to IOC. Note: the F-22 program started around 1981 and the IOC was 2005. Glass houses, eh?

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