Jane’s: It’s beyond All Doubt China Is Developing J-18 VTOL Stealth Fighter

J-18 VTOL Stealth Fighter 1

J-18 VTOL Stealth Fighter 2

J-18 VTOL Stealth Fighter 3

Japanese and US media have lots of speculation about China’s third fourth-generation stealth fighter jet J-18 in addition to the J-20 and J-31 already widely known.
Japan’s Asahi Shimbun was the first to publish a report on the successful test flight of J-18 at the beginning of 2013.
It said that China began to develop its own catapult for the aircraft carrier it planed to build but lacked key technology to make such catapult; therefore, China scrapped its original plan for a carrier for horizontal taking off of aircrafts and began instead to develop VTOL aircrafts.
Soon afterwards, US Defense News weekly published an article that believed that China was developing short-distance vertical taking-off and landing stealth fighter jet, i.e. J-18 Red Eagle VTOL fighter jet, with superb stealth function and installed with laser active phased array radar, internal weapon bays and two vector engines with great thrust.
The Japanese and American reports, though sensational in nature and supplemented by later reports, are but speculation. There had been no evidence on the existence of J-18 whatever until now when Britain’s Jane’s Defense Review published a report on the fighter containing a recent photo copied from a post at a Chinese military forum on the Internet.
Judging by the photo given by Jane’s, J-18 looks almost the same as J-31 except its canard structure. This gives people the impression that it is a VTOL version of J-31. It sounds reasonable as developing a VTOL version saves money than the development of an aircraft from nothing. This is also the case with US F-35 stealth fighter jet. It has three versions including a VTOL version.
However, J-31 is developed by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation who has no experience in developing canard aircrafts. It is suspected that the aircraft is a national project participated by Shenyang and other aircraft manufacturers.
The photo shows that like J-31, it is also powered by two engines perhaps due to China’s lack of an engine powerful enough to power the fighter alone. But some analysts believe twin engines are safer than a single engine.
However, there is the question: Since China has successfully built an aircraft carrier for horizontal taking off, why shall it develop VTOL stealth fighter jets?
The answer for some people are that there must be a smaller amphibious attack warship carrying VTOL stealth aircrafts to supplement the large nuclear aircraft carriers with electromagnetic catapult that China will build in the future.
This blogger simply does not buy that. The generally accept view is that China will follow the US to be a world police so that it has to have aircraft carrier fleets to send Chinese troops far away to fight battles in other countries.
China shall never do that. The failures of European colonialism and US failure in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have provided enough lessons that military invasion will bring no benefit to a country.
European colonialists failed and have to retreat from Southeast Asia in spite of their overwhelming economic and military power, but Chinese immigrants without money and without military support from their homeland have succeeded there. They either dominate or are very influential in the area now.
The above facts teach China it shall never try to conquer other nations. If it has already had state-of-art nuclear aircraft carriers, it had better sell them. If it cannot find a buyer for them, it had better scrap them and use the waste steel. Why? Because they are too expensive to maintain.
Then, however, what will China have to defend its trade lifeline in the world? Amphibious warships with VTOL aircrafts are quite enough, but they are not able to counter the nuclear carrier battle groups of a superpower.
To deal with such groups, China shall develop integrated space and air capabilities, which will enable it not only to defend its trade lifelines but also to counter attack from the space.
Remember, we are now living in the space era!
Source: qianzhan.com “Was J-18 test flight at Inner Mongolia pure imagination? Jane’s Defence: I’s beyond all doubt” (summary by Chan Kai Yee)