F-16 Replacement

[Tukhachevskii]

The Information Dissemination blog has photos and many links to other photos and blogs regarding what appears to be a new Chinese 4th/5th generation fighter that is about to enter flight test.

http://www.informationdissemination....#disqus_thread

Maybe it is all photo shopped, maybe not. The consensus of the various authors is that it is not.

James Fallows wrote that the Chinese can get things into production and onto the streets very fast, faster than us. He gave an example of their having a knockoff of a new American electronic product on the street a day or two after the product launch of the American model. And the Chinese knockoff had more features. That may have some bearing on how fast they can get a new fighter into operation.

What do you get when you cross a YF-23 with an F-22 and a PAK?

Which reminds me...I wonder what the J-10 reminds me of?

Maybe it's time we planted spies in China?

[carl]

This is Bill Sweetman on what he thinks the new Chinese superfighter, the J-20 is meant to do.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs...entId=blogDest

He figures it is a high altitude, long range supercruiser meant to pick off things we can't afford to lose, like AWACS, tankers and any little fighter that could not that happens to get in the way, from on high. I think this a bit worrisome.

[Fuchs]

We'll see the length of their weapons bay soon. A moderate length would restrict the length of internal missiles to below super long range air-air missiles.
That in turn would not exactly support an anti-AEW mission.

An example for such super long-range A/A missiles are AA-13 Arrows.

[carl]

If the fighter had very long range wouldn't that make up for a missile of somewhat shorter range, especially if it were launched at great speed and from high altitude? The J-20 appears quite large. Perhaps something like a Meteor would do. That is a fraction of the size of the AA-13.

[Fuchs]

It's not about the range, but about avoiding to close in, because that's risky.

An AEW&C aircraft may reliably detect VLO fighters at let's say 100 km. A F-22 combat air patrol could then escort it and go on supercruise to engage every attacker who's spotted at that distance.
A long-range missile would enable the attackers to shoot at the easily detectable AEW&C aircraft from 150-250 km away, avoiding the risky air combat.

(The figures were just examples, meant to only explain the dynamic.)

[carl]

A F-22 combat air patrol could then escort it and go on supercruise to engage every attacker who's spotted at that distance.

That's the rub. There won't be many F-22s.

[Fuchs]

That's probably exactly the right thing.

The F-22 is already partially obsolete. It lacks some important features that were introduced about 30 years ago (IRST, helmet mounted sight) and has troubles with some utterly standard air war features (datalink).

Very low observability ("stealth") technology is at a maturity point, whereas signal processing and various counter-VLO technologies make still huge improvements. The F-22's design concept has been publicly known since at the latest 1991 (YF-22) and is really a 80's concept (actually, it dates in its philosophy back to about '71!).
All competitors were developed to defeat it and its ilk, as were some air defence systems.

(The F-22 is a parallel to the F-4: Expensive, large, impressive in its technology, dependent on one specific approach to air combat and most likely very vulnerable to opponents who deny to play along (the F-4 boasted great speed, unparalleled radar effectiveness, a second crew member, a medium range air combat missile and was supposed to defeat the enemy many miles ahead - but then obsolete MiG-17s began to close in, fly circles around it and shoot at it with supposedly obsolete guns!).
Similarly, the F-22 boasts stealth, supercruise, limited thrust vectoring, a very high combat altitude and is supposed to defeat the enemy with dash & run at high altitude and over long distances.)


A fighter weakness is the best motivator for the development of a better fighter (or whatever takes over a fighter's functions) and might thus be very beneficial in the long term.
It's better to have 300 F-22 successors in 2030 than 500 F-22s.
This reduces the period of uncertain air superiority to about 2020-2030 unless the bureaucracy fails to launch and manage a timely successor program.