An unexpected guest during the recent highway landing exercises, I’ve heard of FOD and bird strikes, but a fighter being taken out by a stray dog would have been a first.

PAF JF-17 at Zuhai 2016, the near vertical high AoA take off is always impressive.

This whole saga is more dramatic than a Bollywood movie…didn’t the MMRCA competition specify a twin-engine aircraft? And after 15 years they eventually select the Rafale as the winner, but instead sign for just 36, and now change their minds to a single-engine type to essentially fulfil the same role? Utterly bizarre. Why not simply buy more Rafales? Why have they changed their minds from twin engines to single engine? Why didn’t they realise this sooner and instead cancel the Rafale deal and buy 126 of a single engine type?

The first mockups of the J10 were Lavi clones, they were not more or less similar , they were THE Lavi, they didnt look like a Typhoon, they didnt look like the J9, those mockups were the Lavi in PLAAF markings, period.
On top of that we have photograpic evidences of the J10 design team right in front of a bl###y Lavi, and if this was not enough we have a bucket load of Chinese hardware that is without a question a direct copy of Israeli equipment in the exact same timeframe of the development of the fr####ing Lavi, the most obvious example the AAM that would have been the, guess what, the main air to air munition of the… bleeding Lavi, and if THIS was not enough we have the Russians stating to Janes that Chengdu actually received one Lavi airframe and quite a few Israeli sources stating that “yeah, we helped”…
Lies, all damned lies!

You dont have to be a genius to understand that in 1989 China lost access to the PW1120, so they went to the Russians, more precisely to the AL31 wich is a bigger, heavier, more powerful engine, so they had the redesign the airframe, thats why the J10 is a bigger aircraft. The end.

That certainly explains the large crank and hump in the fuselage of the J-10 (which I have always found ugly), compared with the smooth lines on the Lavi and Viper.

And even then, with the JF-17s, they are trying hard to get their hands on F-16s, if not new because they cannot afford them, then second hand. So if the PAF can get F-16s and JF-17s at the same time, I could use your logic to simply proclaim that the JF-17 is a failure.

But hold on a second, isn’t that what the IAF is now considering, acquiring the F-16, despite having the Tejas? By your own logic, the Tejas is a failure too. The token 100 or so Tejas seems to be a face saving gesture. Why even consider yet another single engine type if the Tejas is what it has been claimed to be? Why doesn’t the IAF order more? Why no MK2 version?

In my view, the J-20 appears to be far more agile in the air than its design would otherwise suggest, at least based on the videos so far available, and especially considering the fact that it lacks TVC.

I thought the Chobam IFR probe on the Tejas would be retractable, similar to the solution on the Jaguar. The images above show a rather crude afterthought solution.