China Stuns with Heavy Stealth Tactical Jet's Sudden Appearance

twz.com

14 points·hunglee2··4 comments

> Aside from the sheer size of the new aircraft, which we will address in a moment, the most striking thing about it is its planform and tailless configuration.

> Maybe the aircraft’s most unusual feature is its air intake arrangement. It appears to have an air intake on top of the fuselage, as well as twin intakes on either side of the lower fuselage.

The computing power required for coordinating flight control surfaces and power would be intriguing to look into. At this point ancient history, but the F-117 is what introduced me to the concept: "It is aerodynamically unstable in all three aircraft principal axes and thus requires constant flight corrections via a fly-by-wire (FBW) flight system to maintain controlled flight" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F117

Why is the landing gear out in all photos?

Because it's much easier to get a clear photo when the jet is moving relatively slowly at low altitude.

It's also easier to control an inherently unstable tailless delta-wing at low speed, with gear down and control surfaces up. Which is exactly what we see.

It's possible this was an attempt to make the videos possible, but it's also plausible that the videos were possible because this thing needs to fly low and slow to stay in the air in its present form.

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