Well, simple really. CAC and SAC hate each other’s guts. SAC is not going to release a J11 for CAC to test their new toys on, and even if they did, I doubt CAC would be happy about letter SAC get that close to their newest toys.
The J10B would be used to test out the ‘back-end’ of the radar. The J20’s would get a bigger antenna, but the integration work would be a lot quicker and smoother if the back-end systems has already been thoroughly tested, debugged and improved.
That would make sense if the J10B came after the J20. Of course it won’t be the exact same bits of equipment, but the J10B could easily be used to test and develop the key technologies and theories underpinning the new generation radar and avionics.
Once you have cracked the key technical bottlenecks of being able to make the different systems work individually and as an integrated whole, upsizing it all to fit into a much larger airframe with more power and space would be a doddle in comparison.
The first few J20 prototypes will be used for aerodynamic testing, so that will keep all the airframe guys at CAC busy analyzing the data and developing refinements. The aircraft will be so stuff full of testing equipment there would not be a chance to test the avionics suit on the planes.
That leaves all the radar and avionics guys a bit idle while the airframe guys work out what the final configuration would be and the manufacturing guys make some pre-production airframes. Only then will the avionics guys get to put their wares on the J20, but that could easily be 5 years down the line from now or more.
In the meantime, they could focus their time and energies developing, testing and refining the core technologies on the J10B, then applying the lessons learned from that experience on what will go into the J20. That way, the first batch of radar and avionics to go into the plane will already be fairly mature tech and should have a lot less integration and performance issues than if there were putting it all together for the first time. That might shave a good few years off of the development timeframe. On top of that, the PLAAF gets a pretty damn fine J10B out of if.
Since money is not an issue, there really is no downside to doing things this way that I can see of.
Well, aren’t the “electronic guys” (possibly Nanjing Research Institute of Electronic Technology or whatever the leading radar design house) independent from both SAC and CAC?
I mean, even if SAC was the winner, radar would have come from Nanjing. So J-11B might be a test bed too.
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