Shen Fei released a video to introduce the glorious history of its development, and the last part listed the models it has developed in the form of CG, including the J-11, J-15 and Falcon stealth fighter. The CG model of the Falcon fighter is marked with its designation J-31B, which is obviously an abbreviation for J-31B.
This also means that not only J-35, but also J-31 in the PLA, and what is even more surprising is that it also uses the world's original side bomb bay, which can carry two air-to-air missiles at the same time.
This also means that based on the original FC-31, Shenfei developed the J-31 in service in the Air Force and the J-35 in service in the Navy. China will become the first country in the world to have three fifth-generation fighter jets.
The failure of the F35 universal design
Why didn't China develop a land-sea general-purpose III fighter like the US F35? The U.S. military's F35 universal design has been proven to fail, and the F35 series fighters are divided into three types: land-based F35A, vertical/short take-off and landing F35B, and carrier-based F35C.
The reason why this is so is because the United States wants to save money, so it pulls in a group of allies to contribute money and efforts, and in order to allow allies to purchase willingly, F35 has many functions written on the PPT, the avionics architecture is open, the three services are common, the allied hardware - to, the intelligent management of component life, such complex functions,. America's hollowed-out manufacturing industry simply has no way to meet such a requirement.
And that's not all, these countries have also put forward a lot of requirements accordingly, which adds a lot of difficulty to the already difficult F35 project.
Therefore, in order to reduce the cost of the three F35 fighters as much as possible, we can only increase the common proportion of parts of the three F35 derivative models as much as possible.
But we must know that the requirements of the Air Force and the Navy for fighters are very different, and many indicators are even contradictory.
For example, carrier-based aircraft need to face high temperature, high humidity, and high salt environments for a long time, and have high requirements for engine and fuselage corrosion protection. In order to take off and land on an aircraft carrier, carrier-based aircraft are required to have good low-speed take-off and landing performance. Carrier-based aircraft also require that the plane size be reduced as much as possible so that several more aircraft can be installed on the aircraft carrier, which requires that the wings of carrier-based aircraft can be folded. In the case of an ejection model, the carrier-based aircraft is also required to have sufficient structural strength to prevent the aircraft from being pulled apart by the catapult.
In order to improve the damage resistance of fighters, carrier-based fighters are best designed with twin engines. Stringent general requirements ultimately led to repeated compromises during the design process for the F35 family of fighters, which prevented the optimal design. For a simple example, the American F22 wing and fuselage connectors can only be cast with hot isobaric first, and then welded, not only lower fatigue strength, but also greater weight, the consequence is that the empty weight of F22 is more than several tons larger than J-20, which directly offsets the maneuverability advantage brought by the technical advantages of the engine, in addition, the F35 series fighters are not like J-35, J-10C The rear half of the fuselage adopts a reduced diameter design, like a bloated big fat man.
This directly leads to greater aerodynamic drag of the F35 series fighters, with a maximum speed of only Mach 1.6, and it is impossible to use supersonic cruise, while the 1.0 version of the Shenfei FC31, which has been complained by netizens about the serious lack of power, has a maximum speed of Mach 1.8.
Not only that, the blind pursuit of universal design, eventually brought a bunch of defects, F35 design flaws are very many, according to the official information of the American F35 project, the current United States and its allies use the F35 fighter jet, there are still 871 software and hardware defects. These deficiencies seriously affect the fighter's all-weather sortie capability, uptime rate, and logistical maintenance capability.
The most serious problem is the defect of the engine, the fuel pipe of the F35 engine is defective, and the fuel pipe is on the surface of the engine, which transports fuel from the fuel supply port to the fuel nozzle. In general, the fuel volume needs to be controlled, which is done by the fuel regulator of the engine. In order to control the amount of fuel, the fuel regulator needs to sense the state of the engine, that is, it needs to connect various sensors, such as air pressure, temperature, speed, etc. Most of the sensors are electronic, but there are also hydraulic ones, so there are more oil pipes.
Back in September 2018, a U.S. Marine Corps F-35B stealth fighter crashed during training. After a one-year investigation, it was found that a manufacturing defect caused the engine's fuel line to break during flight, causing the engine to lose power, and they also found that 117 aircraft – about 40% of the world's F35 at the time – had the same type of fuel line to be replaced.
But until 2024, this problem has not been solved. The core of these problems is that in order to save money and draw a big pie for its allies, the United States has adopted too many innovative designs, and the cost is too high, and it can only develop as many universal designs as possible, which eventually leads to the emergence of problems.
From a business point of view, the F35 is indeed a success, and now the full-cycle order has exceeded 6,000 aircraft, but in terms of technology, the advantages are mainly situational awareness and network-centric combat capabilities in addition to stealth, plus a large amount of cheapness - the unit price of F35A has fallen below 80 million US dollars.
The difference between the J-31 and the J-35
But in terms of combat effectiveness, F35 is not a qualified fifth-generation fighter, which is why, Shen Fei will be based on the FC-31 difference in the development of an important reason, and the navy's J-35, J-31 may be the Chinese Air Force's own model, according to the American "power" website report, J-31's wing area is significantly smaller than J-35, and the J-35 horizontal tail almost touches the wing, but J-31 There is obviously a distance between the two. Because carrier-based fighters have a larger wing area that allows for better maneuverability when landing at low speeds, this is very important for carrier-based aircraft.
At the same time, the landing gear of the J-31 has only one front wheel, instead of the double front wheel design of the J-35. The J-31 also does not have an ejection tow bar on the landing gear of the J-35. This is because the landing gear of the J-35 is specially reinforced for carrier-based aircraft to catapult and take off and land on the aircraft carrier, which will pay an additional weight price, and the J-31 taking off from a land airfield obviously does not have this need.
And the biggest special feature of Shen Fei's J-31 is that two air-to-air missiles can be seen in the open side bomb bay. The stealth fighters of the previous countries all used internal bomb bays to minimize the radar reflection area, among which the F-22 and J-20 both adopted the side bomb bay + main bomb bay design, the side bomb bay accommodated short-range combat missiles, and the main bomb bay was equipped with medium-range air-to-air missiles or ground attack weapons. But both stealth fighters can only have one air-to-air missile in each side of the bomb bay. That is, when performing air-to-air operations, the F-22 usually uses the cooperation of two combat missiles + 6 medium-range missiles, while the armament of the J-20 is two combat missiles + 4 medium-range missiles. As for the American F-35 stealth fighter, it does not have a side bomb bay design, and when the main bomb bay is equipped with medium-range air-to-air missiles or ground attack weapons, it can only be equipped with combat missiles on the wing tips, destroying the stealth shape.
Judging from the side bomb bays of the J-31B, which can accommodate two combat missiles, it is obviously a strengthened design for this problem, but before the actual service, we still do not know how the J-31 realizes how to place a total of 4 air-to-air missiles in the side bomb bay.
As a medium-sized fifth-generation fighter, although the J-31 may not be comparable to heavy fighters like the J-20 in some aspects, the J-31 also plays an indispensable role as an important part of the Chinese Air Force's high and low matching.
And compared with F35, J-31's combat capabilities far exceed F35, using the second-generation gallium nitride radar phased array radar, while F35 is still gallium arsenide radar, after using the second-generation gallium nitride radar phased array radar, J-35 in addition to the situational awareness is at the top level of stealth fighters, but also has higher survival and penetration capabilities, which can more easily achieve multi-functional, multi-target tracking and multi-target attacks.
In addition to radar, the corresponding missile performance has naturally been greatly strengthened Among them, the Thunderbolt-15 air-to-air missile has a range of more than 200 kilometers, and the latest Thunderbolt-17 is expected to have a range of 400 kilometers (the US military believes that China's Thunderbolt-17 missile uses the latest technology, such as supersonic gliding warhead and inertial guidance technology, which can shoot down any mobile vehicle). In comparison, the AIM-260 long-range air-to-air missile being developed in the United States has a range of only about 250 kilometers.
With the blessing of these two turbofan-19 engines, the maximum speed of the J-35 carrier-based aircraft has reached Mach 2.2, which completely exceeds the F35 fighter without supersonic cruise capability. The main advantage of a single engine is in the early stage of fighting, as well as some small actions that require agility, but because of the aerodynamic layout design of the F35, the F35 does not have an advantage in maneuverability, and in general, the J-35 has achieved an all-round transcendence of the F35, which can be called the world's most maneuverable medium-sized stealth fighter.
On the battlefield, the J-035 will also be paired with the J-20 Highland, imagine that on the battlefield of the future, the J-20 is responsible for long-range strikes and air supremacy, while the J-31 is responsible for close support and air combat.
summary
As for the Navy's J-35, it not only meets China's needs for carrier-based fifth-generation aircraft, in addition to being equipped with an electromagnetic catapult aircraft carrier "Fujian" ship, it will also be equipped with two sliding aircraft carriers "Liaoning" and "Shandong" ships in service in the Chinese Navy, J-35 can catapult and take off, and can achieve glide take-off, which means that the structural design and aerodynamic design of the aircraft have reached a very high level. What is even more interesting now is how it will operate on the Liaoning/Shandong ship - I don't know if it will follow the J-15's crosshairs directly, or if there will be a new line. Since the flight deck has not been officially released for the time being, this will also need to wait for a while.
At present, it is certain that China wants to achieve the unity of the three aircraft carriers, and the J-15B and J-35 will become the norm for China's aircraft carriers, which can not only greatly improve the combat effectiveness of the two gliding aircraft carriers, but also provide more landing platforms for its carrier-based aircraft in the event of wartime aircraft carrier damage, and the carrier aircraft on it can still attack normally on other aircraft carriers, so as to preserve combat strength as much as possible and maximize combat effectiveness.
It can be said that the emergence of the J-31 also shows that with the rapid development of China's aviation industry, the US Air Force's only stealth fighter numerical advantage is also rapidly disappearing. As for the UAVs and manned aircraft, which are regarded as the prospects for the development of the future air force, the Chinese Air Force, represented by the two-seat J-20, is even ahead of the United States.