CHINA'S J-20 FIGHTER APPEARS TO HAVE A NEW HOMEGROWN ENGINE

The People's Republic of China's military aerospace sector has established a pattern of achieving technological milestones, but then keeping completely silent about those advancements during the kind of major international expositions when a newsworthy development is normally announced with great fanfare.

In the years when it was still safe for western defence correspondents to freely attend the PRC's largest defence expo, Air Show China, the joke was always that there would be a game of hide-and-seek about news that would only come out after the show. It appears that in 2023, the PRC's Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) has stuck to the script.

During the week that the world's aerospace community gathered at the Paris Air Show, no one in the Chinese delegation had any news at all about their most advanced and speculated about combat aircraft programme, the 5-th generation Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter. The only indication that something might be afoot was the subscale model of J-20 on AVIC's stand in the exhibition hall, one of many models the company showed off at its booth. However, on June 28, four days after the Paris show ended, video emerged of the J-20 making its first public flight equipped with a pair of Xi'an-built Woshan-15 engines. While not the first time the WS-15 has been equipped on the jet, it appears to have flown with one WS-15 and one older design in 2022, typical of flight testing for a new engine, the flight with two WS15s is a sign of maturity and confidence that, after years of delays, a homegrown, advanced fighter jet engine is ready for prime time.

Finally bringing the WS-15 to successful operational status is a major milestone for Chinese aerospace. That the PLAAF now have an engine that delivers the range/payload performance that the J-20 was designed for from the beginning makes the fighter jet more of a concern for the US Navy and other US partner nations in the Pacific that could potentially encounter it in combat. The system should provide a significant boost in performance over the previous engines used by the J-20, the Russian Salyut / Lyulka AL-31FN and the successive WS-10 variants built by the Shenyang Liming Aircraft Engine Company.

A long developmental goal