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Chinese Stealth Fighter Jet May Use US Technology
Ponca City writes "In 1999, a US F-117 Nighthawk was downed by a Serbian anti-aircraft missile during a bombing raid. It was the first time one of the fighters had been hit, and the Pentagon blamed clever tactics and sheer luck. The pilot ejected and was rescued. Now, the Guardian reports that pieces of the wrecked F-117 stealth fighter ended up in the hands of foreign military attaches. 'At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,' says Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia's military chief of staff during the Kosovo war. 'We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies... and to reverse-engineer them.' Zoran Kusovac says the Serbian regime routinely shared captured western equipment with its Chinese and Russian allies. 'The destroyed F-117 topped that wish-list for both the Russians and Chinese,' says Kusovac."
...is a pirated copy of Windows 7 they bought in a Shanghai alley.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It seems only fair to ask whoever just had to take the shiny toy out for a spin whether it was worth it for Serbia?
We think they're using some of our stealth tech. We tried to check, but couldn't find the plane. =(
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You don't believe in the "free market"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
We got the technology for the F-117 Nighthawk from the downed alien space craft in Roswell. So why can't the chinese get it from us?
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brilliant!
even if it were true, it's so stealthy that we couldn't see one to prove it :)
So our F-117A gets shot down by a Yugoslav-made SAM, based on a Soviet design, in Serbia ten years ago. The F-117A was already close to 20 years old at the time, and it was retired in 2008. This is definitely the tech I want to be copying for my state-of-the-art stealth aircraft.
So, why exactly are we concerned that the J-20 will give the F-22 or F-35 a run for their money? We already know that the F-22 can splash (in mock combat) F-15s and F-16s with missiles before the F-22 is even detected. If the Chinese merely copied stealth tech from the F-117A and (apparently) photos of the F-35, is it really going to have good enough stealth to stand up against the F-22 or even just the F-35 in actual combat?
The US could have (should have?) bombed the wreckage at the time.
The 117 is old hat, and was never all that stealthy.
The new Chinese J20 fighter reported recently is based on features found on much later US and Russian designs, and bears little resemblance to the F117.
Technology stolen would probably include anti-radar coatings and perhaps engine and avionics.
The J20 is simply too big to be very stealthy.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The F-117A is a bomber or "ground attack" aircraft, it is not an air-to-air fighter, despite what stupid movies and popular media say. This summary is also incorrect in calling it a fighter.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
In March it was shot down, in May, the US "accidentally" bombed the Chinese Embassy. There was widespread speculation the next day that it was to destroy stealth material. It wasn't a random bomb that fell onto Embassy grounds, but the most precise bomb that was available, with GPS coordinates given by the CIA rather than military intelligence, and dropped right on top of a specific foreign agents office, 5 times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade
So you know exactly what was in the the paint that the F-117 used? What about the materials used in the inlet cover of the plane to mask the engine noise and radar signature? How about the ceramic used to cool and disperse the heat in the exhaust? Just because you can see a schematic of the plane today doesn't not mean there are some facts that have not been disclosed. If foreign governments got the parts, they could analyze and reverse engineer them. There isn't a government (friendly or hostile) on this planet that wouldn't be interested in obtaining parts of a downed stealth fighter.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We have some blurry photos of a largish fighter or light bomber, with a shape that looks like it was designed with a low RCS (Radar Cross Section) in mind, that would be done using equations the USSR published in the 1960s (never thinking that computers would become fast enough for them to be practical). What you would get from an F117 wreck would be RAM (Radar Absorbant Materiels), but how you can tell what an aircraft is made from via those photos is beyond me. Get the info from a US aircraft trying to track it, and you can say something, but all we can do with what is known now is speculate (which sure is fun).
Plato seems wrong to me today
One of the more serious problems with the military-industrial complex's development process, besides obvious little things like threatening to kill millions of people and possibly initiate nuclear winter, is that it takes a large number of scientists and engineers and diverts them away from useful civilian technology and diverts their talents to working on projects that ideally will never be used, and hides any parts of that work that could be useful away where the public can't use it.
There are occasionally useful technologies that escape - this "Internet" thing really is more convenient than uucp and Usenet were, and GPS is really cool but there are other ways to implement wide-area navigation systems without satellites. But they guys who were making tank engines 20% more efficient could have been doing that for truck engines or car engines, and the people working on improving small supersonic airplanes could have been improving civilian passenger or cargo airplanes instead.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This shouldn't be a newsworthy headline. This is what a newsworthy headline would look like:
"Chinese Stealth Fighter Uses Only Chinese Technology"
The Onion version: "Chinese Stealth Fighter Uses Only North Korean Technology"
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As for the new Chinese stealth fighter, it's reported to be an even match for the Raptor...
You mean the J-20 which is due to be operational 6-8 YEARS from now? Most of what is "known" about it is just speculation based on some very limited information. Most performance projections are going to be pure conjecture until more information is available.
As for matching the F-22, did it occur to you that the folks selling the F-22 might have a vested interest in proclaiming this jet to be competitive with the F-22? Fear is a great way to sell weapons. It's certainly possible to design a jet to match the F-22, but its not remotely clear that this Chinese jet reaches or will reach that level of performance.
After that incident i always found it odd how the media reacted to such things. The media never reported on just how blatant the strike was. Instead the main stories been reported around the time were "attacks on US nationals increase" as various Chinese protest groups vented their anger on American government buildings around the world. Essentially the reports were made to make the Chinese look bad.
Now it's obvious that Chinese media is a complete farce. It's state controlled and blatantly so. But i also have to wonder if our western media isn't exactly the same but just smarter about it? Sure it isn't blatant like Pravda or China Daily but our western media still seems to reach for the same goals as Pravda and China Daily would. From getting people behind support of a war to excusing completely unjustifiable actions. Our media seems no better, just smarter and less blatant. Probably makes our media more dangerous than theirs to be honest.
Similar things happened in the Hainan Island spy plane incident. The Chinese returned the crew in perfect health and the also spy plane to the US but they were the bad guys according to the media i'm exposed to. I really don't get our media. I'm sure if the roles were reversed China would still be made out to be the bad guys.
Yet again the same thing with the Iraq war. There were never any links to Al-Qaeda. No WMDs. But our media didn't even report that as a possibility in the lead up to war.
The F-117 is 25-30 year old technology at this point. I would be more worried about the tech being freely handed over to China by companies like Boeing when they go into partnerships with Chinese state owned firms.
Yep. As I pointed in another post, the details matter - a great deal. If the stealth fighter (which I have no experience with) is anything like nuclear submarines (which I do have experience with), what's on the web and other places isn't actually all that detailed or informative. (Not to anyone who actually knows the details that is, though it may impress the less well informed.)
What exactly is the basis for these claims that the tech is stolen and they cant do it on their own?
The fact that China is not a major exporter of aircraft, particularly of the cutting edge military variety. The fact that they don't even produce a 4th generation fighter of their own design (most of their fighters are copied/adapted from Russian designs) and suddenly they unveil this supposed 5th generation fighter supposedly without any foreign technology. Major leaps in technology like that generally do not happen without some help. The Chinese are smart people but development of that kind of technology takes time and infrastructure neither of which seem to be applicable here. It's not that they couldn't do it; it's just that it is unlikely that the could do it that fast without getting a little boost on the information front.
Stealth has been around for a long time
No it hasn't and what has been around is among the more highly guarded secrets among the military forces that have access to it.
Chinese may well have found a way to do it.
Certainly possible, though the smart money says that they probably acquired significant amounts of knowledge through spying. Please note that this isn't a condemnation, every country spies including the US. China acquiring this technology illicitly seems the most likely source.
there have been a lot of Chinese researchers in the US, they may not have worked directly on the projects, but definitely there must be many who worked on relevant projects, and nothing is stopping them from taking the knowledge back to their country with them.
You think the defense industry isn't aware of that possibility? I've been in factories where they make fighter jets. Foreign nationals are quite carefully monitored and aren't given access to sensitive technology without some very careful background screening.
Air Power Australia has excellent coverage of the J-20.
Chengdu J-XX [J-20] Stealth Fighter Prototype: A Preliminary Assessment
J-20 Stealth Fighter: China's First Strike Weapon
And if you want to know why scrapping the F-22 was a bad idea and why the F-35 won't cut it in future conflicts, read this: Surviving the Modern
Integrated Air Defence System
See that "Preview" button?
It's a prototype or technology testbed. I wouldn't be surprised to see the J-21 (or whatever they decide to call the next prototype) feature Chinese designed vector thrust engines with more power when they can get them figured out and to improve dramatically on its stealth capabilities.
The aircraft is quite big, so I'm not sure its truly a fighter as some sort of attack aircraft. In that role it can be argued that provided the front stealth technology is good it doesn't matter how bad the RCS is when it is leaving the combat zone.
Whilst I'm sure there may be an element of truth in the claims that the Chinese and Russians wanted bits of the F-117, its hardly news. The US has repeatedly used stuff from Russian aircraft that have landed in the West(or Japan) when their pilots wanted to defect, so there's hardly anything surprising about the Chinese wanting to analyse fragments of the downed US aircraft.
I don't think that they used much of the F-117 tech in the J-20 though - it looks like a sort of Eurofighter combined with an F-22.
What also surprises me is why everyone seems to think the Chinese aren't capable of doing this on their own - thousands of engineers who were taught in western Univercities have graduated, returned to China, and some are no doubt applying their skills in the military avionics fields. I also would not be surprised if leading Chinese universities produce graduates and phd students equal to the best the west can offer
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Fixed that for you.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Also, the US economic model is currently proving to not be sustainable, either.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You won't get locked up in China for leaking US Embassy memos either, so it's not really a fair comparison.
Technology stolen would probably include anti-radar coatings and perhaps engine and avionics.
The J20 is simply too big to be very stealthy.
Size has little to do with stealth. The B-2 is about seven times as big as the F-117, but still manages a radar cross-section of 0.1 square meters.
Not to mention that we don't actually know the J-20's dimensions or weight. It may not be any bigger than an F-22.
Anti-radar coatings is a reasonable guess, but China has access to much more modern engine and avionics technology via Russian fighter jets.