Well i got an Airbus friend working in China with fairly good contacts with PLAAF officers, he also states these are rumours, but seems to trust them.

😮

I wonder how/why an airbus employee would have contacts with PLAAF officers? :confused:
Did the PLAAF officers maybe indicate to them that these rumours are maybe credible or if he’s making that judgement by himself (if he’s an experienced PLA watcher he could definitely make the latter judgement with some confidence).

But yeah, my own assessment is that these are rumours that we should treat with skepticism, but the claims themselves are not that unbelieveable at all, especially looking at how F-22s performed in early exercises against the USAF’s 4th gens.

Yes,what I wanted to highlight is that they put on trial (if report is correct) both the effectiveness of 5gen planes than the tactic (of russian origin) to shoot down Awacs using long range missiles.
Double gain then, even a little numbers of 5 gen aircraft can make a difference if used like so.

I would hazard some additional caution as to inferring details about the “report”/rumours that were not necessarily there. Specifically for example, from what I read we do not know how exactly the J-20s supposedly eliminated the AEW&C first.

Obviously one can imagine they used BVRAAMs, likely their PL-15s/PL-12Gs (not the big LRAAM recently revealed on the J-16 which I call PL-XX), and considering the range of the PL-15s/PL-12Gs, engaging the AEW&C would likely not have occurred at excessive ranges — likely no greater than the effective range of AIM-120D, if that.

From there, the supposed engagement of J-10s/J-11s against J-20s is also not explicitly described, but one can assume the inclusion of BVRAAM and WVRAAM.

I would say that the tactic of using 5th generation aircraft to first seek and eliminate the opposing side’s AEW&C before engaging their fighter aircraft (if the opportunity presents itself) would be quite a sensible if not obvious tactic by anyone to use if they had the prerequisite 5th generation aircraft available and were facing a foe composed of 4th gen+AEW&C. It would likely be one of the most foundation tactics to defeat the opposition’s C4ISR nodes in the air, whether it’s China with the J-20, US with F-22/F-35, or Russia with PAK FA, and I wouldn’t quite call it a tactic of Russian origin, as I think that would convey the idea of using ultra long range LRAAMs like KS-172, but rather general counter air/air superiority tactics that would be employed by any air force.

But I digress.

Red Sword 2016 line-up:

Lot of rumors flying around regarding the exercise. While PLAAF is very happy with the J-20, they’ve got a rude shock how ineffective J-10 + J-11 + AWACS combo were. If specific engagements involving the J-20 were against the the KJ-2000 and J-10 version was the J-10B/C then that is very worrisome. Barring the J-20, that is pretty much the best the PLAAF has and it had not taken the the 2x J-20 too long to finish them-off.

I’d really caution against the validity of these rumours — I mean they make complete sense of course, especially considering the kind of results that F-22s and F-35s were able to achieve against 4th generation fighters in their early exercises as well — the amount of detail they carry and the original source in the threads are a bit dubious imho.

^wow.

Doesn’t these exercises expose it to Japan/US radar in some form ?

This airbase is located in central China, in the middle of nowhere that is also known as Inner Mongolia.

I still can’t get over how long the Weapon bay door’s are on the J-20, they will probably need all the space inside for the new long range missile if current estimates are correct. And another thing, what happened to the PL-21 missile? Disappeared or was this new missile the PL-21? Help! :confused:

They aren’t that long. They’re enough to carry a PL-15/crop wing “PL-12G” with sufficient clearance but not for anything longer.

The new PL-XX missile based on current estimates put it at quite a bit longer than PL-12/PL-15 variants, and will definitely be unable to fit inside the new weapons bay.

We haven’t had news of the ramjet PL-21 for a while. No one really knows what happened to it, could either still be under development or abandoned, no one knows.

Looks like I got it backwards – http://chinese-military-aviation.blogspot.com/p/missiles-iii.html#PL-12G

Missile above might designated PL-12G
The VLRAAM might be designated PL-15

Look like the PL-12C/D below has been replaced by the PL-12G? No word on the PL-21

Huitong said he’s calling it PL-12G and the new missile PL-15.

But I think he’s just pulling those designations from his own inference (which is not an unreasonable thing to do), from conversations with him on SDF, rather than any big shrimps suggesting it.

At this stage I think it makes far more sense to call the new missile PL-XX and continue calling the old missile/crop wing PL-12 as PL-15, given the way the rumours of both have unfolded. but the point is no one seems to really know what the new missile is really called and no one really knows what the old missile should be either.

Like this? :confused:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]249853[/ATTACH]

I’m sure you’ve seen my post on SDF or CDF annotating some of the suspected features on it.

So yes.

And I think there might be another one on the rear too.

Yeah, it is a very big missile. Definitely not going to fit inside the J-20. So probably a long-ranged “AWACS killer” and maybe an anti-tanker role as well.

the study mentions it has reaction thrusters, and combined with a semi ballistic trajectory I think it could definitely be viable against fighter aircraft.

but this thing definitely isn’t meant to fit in J-20’s weapons bay, and I see it more like a long range a2a “fire support”