Shenyang J-31/35 Stealth Fighter

Both planes still look like massive flops. I'd take a Strike Eagle or a Flanker.. any day.

They are super expensive because they are supposed to be stealthy... if you take that away then they are in trouble because all the 5th gen high tech avionics and shit... is going in to the new Su-35s and new F-15s too.

More important the US does not seem to have developed the IRST and wing mounted AESA L band radar arrays the Russians have optimised for anti stealth aircraft use...

In a dogfight perhaps yes, but when it comes to electronics, sensors and stealth a 4th gen fighter just isnt good enough.

Su-35 has similar stuff to the Su-57 installed in it including wing mounted L band AESA and modern IRST for hunting stealth aircraft...

Anything they could fit in an F-35 they could put in a new build F-15... but the Russians have been working longer and harder to find anti stealth technology for their aircraft...

With R-77M, R-37M, pl-15/21, Meteor and new US aim 260 I wouldn't want to be in a old flanker or eagle.

Old aircraft are getting upgrades for less than the price of the F-35 programme...

At close range su-27 would be better than a lot of newer jets. However getting in a dogfight against an enemy carrying new state of art missiles is not easy.

But it really comes down to how effective modern IR and ARH missiles are against modern EW technology, and at the end of the day when missiles live up to their name and miss then it comes down to guns... in which case the F-35 is known to be at a disadvantage against most modern fighters.

All the aircraft have pretty bad availability rates in peace time... in war time that changes.

I would expect the opposite to be true... when supply chains are destroyed along with factories, then problems increase... they don't go away.

The whole thing with the F-35 is that its supose to sneak up on you without you even taking notice.

So it doesn't work until your IADS is destroyed... good luck with that. The Su-35 has wing mounted L band AESA antenna that should allow it to find stealth aircraft and hunt them...

Im sure the F-15E and Su-35, Rafale, and Eurofighter can beat it in close range, hell even a Saab Gripen is a better dogfighter. The problem is they never get the chance.

I am guessing that in training they don't give them a chance... if it was so damn invisible and fantastic why wont Israeli F-35s dare enter Syrian airspace to hit Syrian military targets?

Even when they use Russian planes to hide behind they send F-16s because they are faster and have better speed and range...

The F-35 achieved a 20 to 1 kill ratio in its first Red flag against "legace fighters", that says alot.

How hard did they make it?

AWACS aircraft should be able to carry airborne L band sized radars big enough to track stealth aircraft out to enormous ranges.... in actual combat against Russia their OTH radar will detect F-35s at enormous ranges... they could detect F-35s on the Iran Iraq border from Russian territory... and all Russian aircraft not only have IRSTs but also BVR IR guided missiles to deal with stealthy aircraft...

All rafale, su-35, grippen and typhoon have very good EW. F-15 don't because they never really upgraded its EW.

But now that Su-57s are entering service those new build F-15s are likely going to get a mix of avionics from F-22 and F-35 to make them effectively the equivalent of Su-35s.

Detecting a faint f-35 is one thing, that has a RCS of a golfball, take it out before it takes you out is another.

50 years ago that golfball was probably a glitch and was removed as noise so the pilot would never see it, but today that golfball can be confirmed with an IRST scan to see if that golfball has the IR signature of a fighter aircraft and if it has then it is not eliminated as noise... it is brought to the pilots attention... and the information is transmitted to other nearby platforms and the IADS.

F-35 may be stealthy and hard to detect but what matters is being able to evade its missiles at mong range. When you close the gap you just launch your own missiles and get into dogfight.

The point is that the F-35 is really really expensive to buy and to use because they made it super stealthy... except it isn't. To go from basketball to golf ball sized RCS is teh difference between an 80 million dollar aircraft that costs 10K per flight hour to operate and a 120 million dollar aircraft that costs 90K per hour to operate... and the critical thing is that basket balls and golf balls moving at 800km/h at 10km altitude attract your attention... these days you are not going to mistake it for a bird or any insect.

The sad irony is that the Chinese are smart... they have taken the basic shape and likely made a much cheaper plane that they will likely produce in enormous numbers... considering its size they are probably using RD-93s which is a relatively cheap and affordable engine which will give them 16-18 tons thrust depending on the versions, which will likely make this aircraft their Checkmate.

It likely wont be as stealthy as the F-35, but that will make it affordable and vastly more practical and in many roles it will actually be a better plane.

I think it looks better with two engines... and if they have thrust vectoring nozzles it will likely be more manouverable...

Very long range shots are still unlikely and with modern EW systems there is always a good chance it will go to guns if only because modern stealthy fighters carry bugger all missiles internally and lose all their stealth with external missiles so planes like Su-35s and MiG-35s make a lot of sense still.

Is it weird that the fourth version of the F-35 looks the best... the more I see of the J-31/35 the more I like it.

Of course they don't have 600 of them in service like the Americans do, but there is a good chance most things work on the Chinese plane and the programme to build it did not cost 1.5 trillion.

That video on the F-15 is hilarious BTW... the very idea that the F-15 is now obsolete because the US has not been spending enough money made me laugh out loud... they invested billions into the F-22 and trillions into the F-35 and both are falling short of what they wanted and expected.

To fix the F-35 they need new people because the ones who are doing the job now clearly either don't know what they are doing (which I don't believe), or they are just drunk on the gravy train wanting more and more rail heads to deliver fresh hot gravy to their secret bank accounts...

Dare I say it... they need a Rogozin type character to kick arses... and sort that shit out... but I am glad they don't and I am also glad the Chinese clearly have taken the useful parts of their design and adapted it to their wants and needs.

I doubt the Chinese plane will be as stealthy as the F-35 but that is what will make it much cheaper and more affordable and popular and useful and capable.

Seems like the Chinese have taken a piece of crap that had potential (and still does if they had the balls to make the needed changes) and polished it up and made it very shiny.

Come on... you can hardly accuse the Chinese of stealing... at least they invented the language they speak...

BTW I am sure they examined the design and only copied the good bits and had a real chuckle over the bits the Americans are never going to get fixed... it takes real talent to do what they did... not just a case of stealing a top secret design but also collecting all the information on its many faults to avoid making a dog.

They clearly didn't want to replicate the engine so had to change the design to suit two engines which is a radical redesign in itself... in my opinion a massive improvement and it has implications because it probably means there can be no VSTOL version of the aircraft... but considering the performance of the VSTOL versions of the plane that is a good trade off I think.

Half the engineers that worked on the design in the US were probably foreigners anyway, but the people raking in the tax money were likely all Americans through and through.

You have to know what you are doing to copy something like that, and you call it copying, well that is what the US did when they learned of the MiG-25 and needed something to match it... they copied it with their available components and equipment and came up with the F-15... inferior in speed and altitude capacity but superior in most other aspects at the time for the fighter role.

The F-15 is a blatant copy of the MiG-25, so if the US is happy to copy aircraft designs why would they care if China adapts their designs too?

The F-35 has one engine and is expensive junk.

This aircraft looks to have a lot more potential...

They have no reason to apply RAM material except when the aircraft is being used in an operational capacity.

It makes no sense to show how stealthy your aircraft is before you use it.

The Surprise is useful and it is cheaper to not have to deal with aircraft wearing RAM and requiring it to be reapplied on a regular basis.