A Hong Kong daily reports (via the Kyunghyang Shinmun) that the 4th-generation stealth fighters currently being developed by China are based on technology obtained through research of the wreckage of an American F-117A that was shot down during the Kosovo campaign of 1999.
The Chinese hope to deploy then new J-14 fighters sometime around 2015.
The paper reported that the Chinese were able to acquire U.S. Air Force stealth technology after years of study of wreckage of an F-117A shot down by the Serbians during the NATO bombing campaign to end the Kosovo conflict. The Chinese were able to obtain the wreckage through their Serb allies, it said.
13 Comments
Without the mother lode of acquired alien technology from Area 51, how will the Chinese ever fully manage to exploit and improve upon stealth technology?
Oh no, are the Martians working with Beijing?
I doubt it was purely reverse engineering from the wreckage. I would guess that the Chinese have a sophisticated spy network in the US, and got a lot of the stealth technology the same way they got 40 years worth of advanced US nuclear weapons technology - by leaning on ethnic Chinese in the US to provide access to sensitive information.
You know Marmot, you should really stop relying on Hong Kong daily tabloids for military related news about China. They are invariably always wrong.
The F-117 is 1960s technology at its finest. The J-14 looks more like the Su-27 (AKA J-11) and YF-23 (although those photos look a bit photoshopped).
Ho hum. Technology used in war often falls into the hands of unfriendly powers. By the time 2015 rolls around, the Stealth will have been retired to the National Air and Space Museum.
Jing, if you can’t trust the Hong Kong tabloids for reliable information on Chinese security secrets, who can you trust?
Sonagi: By the time 2015 rolls around, the Stealth will have been retired to the National Air and Space Museum.
How true. And the U.S. knows best how to exploit the weaknesses of Stealth.
“The F-117 is 1960s technology at its finest” Well, sort of. The R&D for that program might have been initiated then but I’m pretty certain that stealth aircraft don’t have ’60s era computers, materials, or even paint used in them. The program did develop some along the way and has introduced many cutting edge tech advances. The fuselage design is about the only thing that might still be traceable to the ’60s.
It’s that later technology we should worry about getting into the wrong hands. The Su-27 was for a long time the most maneuverable fighter out there but it just doesn’t have the radar/missile-to-pilot coordination or potency that makes the F-117 electronics package so valuable. That’s not even mentioning the stealth factor.
“Jing, if you can’t trust the Hong Kong tabloids for reliable information on Chinese security secrets, who can you trust? ”
trust these guys.
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/200607.brief.htm
scroll down to #007
and this
http://www.thebulletin.org/art.....j06kulacki
Mr. Chips: OK, most of the technology for the F-117 was initially tested in the 60s (or earlier) and perfected in the 70s. It’s not state of the art. They took an F-16 flight control computer and adapted it for 3 unstable axes instead of just one (the F-16 is unstable only in pitch), for instance.
I don’t mean to press but most of the F-117 technology did not come about in the ’60s. While radar absorbing material had been developed, and even used on the SR-71, only the structural technology concerning the angular shape of the fuselage can be considered ’60s era technology. Other than that, nothing left on the F-117 today was developed in the 60s or 70s. Lockheed didn’t even get the contract until ‘78 and the first actual F-117 test bird was produced in ‘81. The fly-by-wire system mentioned which came from a F-16A was only used in the prototype HAVEBLUE 1001 which crash landed on its first test flight in ‘77 (not conducted by lockheed). The flight control computer on the bird that went down over Kosovo had quadruple redundant fly-by-wire control, which F-16s in the early 80s never had, was developed in the mid 80s and fitted onto the F-117s around ‘88 just in time for action in ‘Panama in ‘89. In fact, one of the most ingenius aspects of the original design is in taking into account the development of future technology. The bird was designed to be electronic plug-and-play and there is an upgrade unit entirely devoted to developing electronic upgrades for the enhancement of F-117 capabilities. It’s the equipment such as radar to missile coordination, acoustic stealth technology, on-board cameras, terrain masking control, updated jamming devices, cockpit environment controls, GPS feeds, etc. that we don’t want the Chinese to have. Almost all of that stuff has been continually updated thoughout the 90s and into the ‘00 years. That stuff all took a lot of time and effort, in planning, building and testing. The Chinese, with their knack for reverse-engineering, get to skip those steps, or at least cut back on them dramatically, by having the product for a design delivered to their doorstep.
If this is true, the Serbs have gotten themselves on Uncle Sam’s shit list for a good long while. I hope the Chinese paid them well. I used to think the Bosnian and Kosovo operations were a waste of ammo over a bunch of Muslims. Now I think not enough ordnance was unloaded on the Serbs.