According to the Hong Kong media "South China Morning Post", a jet plane that has never been seen in the world recently conducted a test flight at an airport on the southern edge of the Mu Us Desert in Ningxia, northwest China.
And this aircraft is very similar to the development direction of the next-generation fighter revealed by the chief designer of the J-20, so in many media articles, it is said that this aircraft is the prototype of our army's "J-40" in the future, and if this is really a sixth-generation fighter, will the United States follow or not?
The South China Morning Post reported on a paper in Advances in Aeronautical Engineering, in which it described in detail the aerodynamic layout of the mother-child fighter with the "trailing edge docking layout".
As can be seen from the exposed design drawings, this mysterious fighter adopts a wing-body fusion design, with a swept delta wing characteristic of a high-speed stealth fighter. From the rear view as well as the side view, you can see that although the aircraft is large, the fuselage thickness is very thin.
Of course, these designs are not the point, and to the astonishment of engineers and scientists, two highly embedded drones are placed at the rear end of the left and right wings of the aircraft, and when not separated, they form a complete aircraft that does not destroy the aerodynamic shape of the parent aircraft. If necessary, the two drones are able to detach from the fighter and become two "flying wing" drones propelled by electric ducted fans, which is also known as the "trailing edge docking layout".
And this layout may be familiar to the United States, which is very similar to the concept of "loyal wingman" that they put forward back then. The so-called "loyal wingman" is actually relative to the traditional wingman, in the traditional fighter formation, it is generally divided into the long plane and the wingman, when the long plane is fighting, the wingman needs to be responsible for the safety and cover of the long plane.
Although the idea is good, but in the actual situation to achieve the difficulty is still quite large, first, to achieve the imaginary cooperation, then the two sides need a considerable tacit understanding, second, at a critical juncture, not all wingmen are willing to choose to sacrifice their lives to defend the long plane, and then take a step back, even if the wingman is willing to "protect each other to death", the final loss is quite large, after all, it takes a huge cost to cultivate such a group of tacit fighter formations.
And for unmanned wingmen, these problems do not exist. As for the critical moment, as an unmanned wingman, under the premise that the system is set up, it can rush up to block the missile for the long aircraft.
Of course, this unmanned wingman also has certain defects, because of its small size, it is impossible to take into account the range while wanting speed, and if the range is satisfied, it cannot keep up with the speed of the long aircraft, so what should I do?
At this time, the emergence of the "trailing edge docking layout" UAV completely solves this problem, when there is no need to perform the task, the unmanned wingman is carried by the long plane, and it automatically falls off when it needs to be dispatched, and after the task is completed, it will return to dock with the long plane, so that you can take into account the speed and range.
The reason why foreign media use "J-40" to describe this aircraft is mainly due to what Yang Wei, the chief designer of the J-20 stealth fighter, said at the Zhuhai Air Show.
At that time, Yang Wei was asked about China's future warplanes, saying that future fighters may be like the Transformers in science fiction movies. The above-mentioned "trailing edge docking layout" fighter is obviously a fighter that can be "transformed", and Yang Wei also said in 2022 that J-30 and J-40 will meet everyone soon, so this is why major media have been hyped up to the end of the Chinese J-40 to come out.
Of course, all this is expert analysis and media commentary, and the official did not give an accurate answer, and how China's sixth-generation aircraft will be carried out is still unknown to us ordinary people. It would be biased to determine the direction of China's sixth-generation aircraft from a single paper.
Many netizens even said that the description of the "rear edge docking layout" fighter in this paper may just be a "strategic deception". That is, this design is just a kind of "smoke screen", and about the fact that our sixth generation chances will not use this design, we neither admit nor deny, everything is left to the US military to guess for itself.
As a result, the U.S. military will be more or less interfered with in the direction of developing sixth-generation aircraft, so will the U.S. military follow up in the end? Let's wait and see!