Japanese Stealth Fighter Announced as 'Return of the Zero'

reporter writes "According to a news article by the Associated Press, Tokyo has begun developing an indigenous stealth jet fighter that will be deployed in 2016. Mitsubishi, the prime contractor, has already developed a full-scale model, of which several pictures have been accidentally leaked to the press. The model is named 'Mitsubishi ATD-X"'. A laboratory of the French government has evaluated the "stealthy-ness" of ATD-X, and given it a high rating. Will ATD-X achieve air superiority over the F-22, which Washington refuses to sell to Tokyo?"

Comments

Or maybe just a mockup?

[dgr73]

While the external frame is very important to any airplane, stealthy or not, what matters is what goes into the plane and what materials is it built out of. You can't just build a life-size carbon fiber chassis and call it a stealth plane if you put a whole heap of non-stealthy stuff inside.

Stealth is a defensive technology anyway, meaning your fighter is stealthy only until a single weakness is found. You can't really say at this point if this is a project that will succeed. Or if it's even meant to succeed. I mean, would you put it past the Japanese to force the US hand to sell them to F22 by threatening to build a competitor which they might sell to god-knows-who to finance the development. the previous sentence is an artistic liberty I took to get my point across, i'm sure the F22 is more advanced than the F15 in areas other than stealth.

Re:Tech issues and socio-political issues.

[MightyMartian]

I'm not going to blame the US for the disarmament of Japan. It was a necessary thing to do in 1945. It was also necessary to make all the reforms, including a constitution which enshrined the peaceful nature of the Japanese military.

But that was 62 years ago, and in the meantime, Japan has become one of the US's most important allies and economic partners, and with the rise of China and the re-rise of Russia, I think it's important to consider that Japan may want to modify the nature of their military, and that maybe it's really in our best interests to allow them to do this.

The Japan of today is not the Japan of the 1930s, and even if it were, it simply is no longer in any position to do much about it.