American F-35s encounter Chinese J-20s over the Pacific

it's finally happened for the first time in history as far as we know American F-35 stealth Fighters have had a close encounter with stealth fighters from another Nation specifically China's j-20 Mighty dragon now I don't want to lie to you this was not a fight but it was a professional encounter that allows us to glean some things about how China is operating its growing stealth fleets let's dive into this and what American defense officials say they learned I'm Alex Hollings and this is air power before we get started I just want to apologize for the late drop last week and just how crazy my schedule's been lately but I am finally back in my office last week I was in Naples Florida for the business Executives for National Securities 40th anniversary policy forum and Gala which was a crazy experience I own a tuxedo now I'll probably never wear it again but I am really happy to report that my Whirlwind tour of the US is finally over and I can get back to doing what I love to do which is making nerdy videos like this so let's dive right into it for the first time in history American stealth Fighters have had a direct interaction with stealth fighters from a non-friendly nation and that's a big deal but I want to be clear that we're not talking about a dog fight here we're talking about a professional encounter that we can use to gather intelligence and learn more about how China is operating their j-20 Fleet The Bare Bones of this story is that the interaction took place in March Somewhere over the East China Sea we don't know how many f-35s or j-20s were involved but according to American defense officials they came into relatively close quarters now interactions between military aircraft from different nations even Nations that aren't particularly friendly with one another aren't uncommon barely a week will go by between headlines about American fighters intercepting Russian bombers off of Alaska's Coast or NATO Jets and Russian Jets intercepting each other and escorting each other around the Baltic Sea but as far as we know there has never been a publicly disclosed interaction between stealth fighters from competing nations in the sky ever before in large part because there just aren't that many stealth Fighters out there that aren't operated by either the United States or one of its allies the the United States operates the largest fleets of stealth aircraft in the world with somewhere between 150 and 186 F-22 Raptors in service and somewhere over 450 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters the US also has a fleet of 20 operational B2 Spirit bombers and at least three new stealth Platforms in active development but that shouldn't come as a surprise after all the United States was the first nation on the planet to field an operational stealth aircraft secretly of course back in 1983 with the F-117 Nighthawk and America's Monopoly on stealth Aviation stretched for 34 years after all the way until 2017 when China first put the j-20 into service in June of this year I tallied how many actual operational stealth Fighters there were in the world with a bit to help from Twitter account Aerospace intelligence and Thomas new dick from the war zone and if you look at a list of the top 11 Nations operating the largest stealth fleets in the world you get a number right around a thousand but of that thousand operational stealth Fighters out there nearly 700 of them are all f-35s in fact nine of the top 10 stealth fleets in the world are all comprised either entirely or largely of f-35s the only nation in the top 10 list that isn't operating the F-35 is China ranked number two with 150 or so j-20s now just in case you're wondering where Russia falls on this list they don't actually land in the top 10 at all that's why I stretched it to a top 11. Russia's Fleet of just 16 su-57s ranks just below Italy with 17 f-35s and of those 16 su-15 sevens 12 are hand-built prototypes that aren't particularly well finished the only reason I even included them in Russia's tally is because Russia accounts them as operational su-57s however ridiculous as that may be I wanted to give them as Fair a shake as I could I also should clarify that these F-35 numbers are based on delivered airframes in other words not the number of jets a nation has on order but rather the number of jets a nation has on hand now I tell you all of this really just to make sure you understand that when it comes to stealth Aviation China is really the only competitor for the United States anywhere on the playing field China's j-20 and forthcoming j31 are Loosely intended to be a match for America's F-22 and F-35 China's h-20 bomber program is widely believed to be based almost entirely on America's B2 Spirit now if you're watching this video there's a really solid chance that you're well aware of what I call China's approach to counterfeit air power or their tenacity for copying other nations airframes in order to try to match their capabilities that's totally true in fact just last week I had the opportunity to meet with former Secretary of Defense Dr Mark esper and that's what we talked about but it's important to remember that China is quickly gaining experience both producing and operating these stealth aircraft we've talked at length in the past about how hard it is to develop and build stealth Fighters the production tolerances just have to be incredibly tight but we've also talked a great deal about how operational planning is totally vital to operating any stealth platform the United States has got literally Decades of experience doing this while China is still learning the ropes but it's that operational experience that was the focus of American defense officials state about this first interaction between America's F-35 and China's j-20 while Pacific Air Force's Commander General Kenneth wilspock described the j-20 as quote nothing to lose sleep over he did qualify that dismissive statement with some positive observations about how Chinese forces are learning to operate their first stealth aircraft now I'm going to quote him here but if you'd rather watch the video in full uploaded by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace studies I'll have a link for it down in the description it's a bit early to say what they intend to do with the j-20 so really all we've seen it do is air superiority but we notice that they are flying it pretty well we recently had I wouldn't call it an engagement where we got relatively close to the j-20s along with rf-35s and the East China Sea and were relatively impressed with the command and control associated with the j-20 in order to appreciate what he means about the command and control associated with the j-20 it would help for us to know a bit more about the fighter itself despite Russia's su-57 felon beating China's j-20 into the air back in 2010 Russia's limited defense budget and struggling economy have resulted in very slow progress and just a lot of setbacks for its own stealth programs as a result China's Chengdu j-20 Mighty Dragon which flew for the first time in 2011 managed to beat the su-57 into service by a three-year margin back in 2017. since then China has built as many as 150 of these Fighters though the figures you'll get from different sources tend to vary pretty widely but even if the exact figure is a bit up in the air they immediately eclipsed Russia's su-57 production and are definitely in second place in terms of nations with the most operational stealth aircraft The j-20s Roots date back to China's jxx program which started in the late 90s by 2008 some 11 years after the F-22 Raptors First Flight chengdu's project 718 was chosen to move forward as the basis for the country's first stealth fighter nevertheless the design they chose would actually see significant revisions in 2014 before being declared combat ready and then put into production in 2017. and what's sure to come as a shock to No One Like many of China's aircraft evidence suggests the j-20 was not designed from scratch domestically the aircraft appears to borrow heavily from earlier stealth fighter programs out of both the United States and Russia specifically America's F-35 and F-22 programs as well as Russia's now defunct stealth fighter effort dubbed the mig-144 but while comparisons to the Mig are mostly based on design similarities comparisons to America's Fighters are based on China's direct access to a plethora of design documents from both stealth fighter programs in August of 2014 a Chinese National living in Canada named Sue bin but who often went by Steven Sue was arrested for leading a hacking effort that stole over 630 000 files from American Aviation firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin all for the Chinese government this theft included blueprints for both the F-22 and the F-35 that according to sue Bin's own emails that were later entered as evidence against him would and I quote allow China to catch up rapidly with U.S levels and stand easily on the Giant's shoulders the single-seat twin-engine Chinese fighter has a wingspan of just more than 42 feet which is a bit shy of the f-22's 44 and it's got an overall length of 69 feet 7 inches which is considerably long longer than the f-22s 62 feet like all stealth fighter programs China's j-20 hasn't been without its developmental headaches but without a free press in China it's hard to know just how many one we know for sure is that the nation has struggled to field its intended fifth generation engine which we call the ws-15 now the ws-15 was supposed to provide the j-20 with 44 000 pounds of thrust from each engine under afterburner but to date they haven't been able to get all the Kinks worked out with it and as a result many of today's j-20s are actually flying russian-sourced fourth generation al-31s which are only capable of producing 33 000 pounds of thrust each more recently China started sourcing their own equivalent which is the ws-10c and in the latest models of the j-20 known as the j-20b China has also began incorporating thrust vector control or the ability to orient the Jet's outflow nozzles independent of the aircraft this is something that both the F-22 and the su-57 have but the F-35 doesn't but depending on your perspective there's good reason for that thrust vector control allows you to perform incredible Maneuvers but most of these Maneuvers scrub a ton of air speed which can leave you vulnerable to subsequent attacks or attacks from other aircraft and fighter pilot culture speed is life and as a result in a lot of the military Aviation Community thrust vector control has sort of fallen out of favor it's really only valuable as a one-on-one dog fighting tool in extremely close quarters which hasn't happened really since the Advent of missiles the F-35 has moved away from the idea that you need to be able to get into Close Quarters and box with your opponent and instead uses more of a sniper approach trying to detect Target and engage opponents from much greater distances leaning more heavily into things like Sensor Fusion and low observability than pound-for-pound hot rod performance and there's a good chance the ngad will follow suit the j-20's top speed has been stated to be Mach 2 with a combat range of 1100 nautical miles and a service ceiling of 66 000 feet it's capable of carrying four medium or long-range missiles inside its Primary Weapons Bay as well as two additional short-range air-to-air missiles and small secondary Bays on either side of its fuselage the j-20 is often compared to America's air superiority F-22 but technically speaking when it was originally designed it was meant to fill a different role while the Raptor was always meant to dominate air combat the j-20 was originally meant to fly deep into enemy territory to conduct strikes against ground targets more akin to the f-35's mission and with that in mind the canards make a bit more sense the j-20 has been deemed by many an independent analyst to be quite a bit less stealthy than either America's F-35 or F-22 but it is thought to be pretty stealthy from directly head on which would be your primary concern in an attack platform by now I'm sure some of you are wondering well what's the j-20s radar cross-section or RCS and how does that compare to the F-22 or the F-35 but before I discuss that I want to give you what's becoming my standard RCS disclaimer which is that rcs's are incredibly difficult to calculate and not often publicly disclosed it's also really important to remember that an aircraft's radar cross-section changes depending on the angle of observation or where the aircraft is in relation to the radar array now if you've never heard the term radar cross-section before technically speaking it's the ratio of Backscatter power to the power density that's received by a Target but that's sort of technical jargon mumbo jumbo for our purposes a radar cross section is the size of an aircraft's radar return the larger an aircraft's RCS the larger it appears on radar the easier it is to detect and potentially Target it's pretty universally understood that the j-20 has a larger RCS than either the F-35 or the F-22 it's really just a question of how much larger but it is so much larger that a lot of people you'll find on the internet will argue that the j-20 isn't a stealth fighter at all likewise with the su-57 which is even less stealthy but the truth is there's no governing body that decides how or where you can use terms like fifth generation or stealth fighter they're really just industry shorthand that became cultural slang in order to be a fifth generation fighter you really just have to have been designed from the onset to limit your detectability there's no requirement that you reach a certain point of low observability in order to be called a stealth fighter you just need to design shine that leans hard into stealth so while the su-57 and j20 are not nearly as stealthy as the F-35 or the F-22 they're both still considered fifth generation Fighters the same way a shitzu and a Pitbull are both dogs now there have been a number of different independent analyzes into the j-20s potential RCS sometimes calculating with the inclusion of radar absorbing materials and sometimes not most of these expert assessments range from as small as 0.1 square meters to as large as five square meters though I have seen some larger chances are good it's somewhere in between but to give you a basis of comparison America's F-16 is widely considered to have an RCS of around five square meters the fa-18 Super Hornet operated by the Navy with no external Munitions or gas tanks is as small as 0.5 square meters the F-35 is as small as point the 0.005 square meters and the F22 has an astonishing RCS of .0001 square meters in other words the f-22's radar cross section is at best 50 000 times smaller than the j-20s and at worst only a thousand times smaller but it's still important to note as American defense officials did about this interaction that the j-20 is rapidly being armed with Advanced Beyond visual range air-to-air missiles weapons like the pl-15 which has a top speed above Mach 4 and a range of around 120 miles a lot of that reach comes from being networked with the incredibly powerful radar in China's KJ 500 Airborne early warning and control aircraft or a-wax I'll go ahead and quote General will Spock again some of their very long range air-to-air missiles are aided by that KJ 500 being able to interrupt that kill chain as something that interests me greatly I'll close out on one more quote from the general because it sums up the situation pretty well we're seeing relatively professional flying and it's still too early to tell exactly what they intend to do with the j-20 whether it's going to be more like the F-35 that's capable of doing many many missions or more like an F-22 that's primarily an air superiority fighter that has some air-to-ground capability now this quote matters because it highlights the fact that the j-20 is getting better every day as is the F-35 these platforms are not static in fact the f-35's performance is so tied to its software that it gets regular software updates that actually make it more capable side by side the F-35 is a more mature program with better trained pilots it's more technologically advanced and it's far harder to detect or Target but the truth is being the best fighter isn't everything both of these Jets have to find a role within a broader military Doctrine and be leveraged with an effective strategy in order to actually win a fight so while the j-20 may be ranked second to last when it comes to the four stealth fighters in the world China is a quick study and they're all in on stealth and with that ends yet another edition of air power from sandbox news I'm Alex Hollings make sure you swing by sandboxnews.com today and every day for the latest in news entertainment and motivation from all around the force if you got anything out of today's video make sure to click like And subscribe down below and leave me a comment so I know what I should cover next and of course don't forget to tap on that Bell icon so you never miss a drop from sandbox news foreign [Music]

Channel: Sandboxx

Views: 4,112,054

Keywords: stealth fighter, f-35, f35, j-20, j20, mighty dragon, joint strike fighter, american fighter, chinese stealth fighter

Id: oOU1BJBO_68

Length: 19min 35sec (1175 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022