Chengdu J-20 Stealth Fighter

ikipedia's claims of 210+ J-20 aircraft is erroneous. People in the know claim close to 300 J-20 aircraft with 100 J-20 aircraft produced being annually by them right now. wrote:

Impressive production . That's how it should be with the Su-57. China started working on the J-20 later and already has 300 of them. Of course, the J-20 is probably not as good as the Su-57 in many aspects.

Impressive production Shocked Shocked . That's how it should be with the Su-57.

It is impressive production, but Russia does not need enormous numbers of Su-57s any more than the US needs 1,000 F-22s.

The US can't afford F-22s and is retiring them so they can spend money on F-35s.... buy more F-35s I say... it is killing them economically... and as they wont be able to just print more money when the US dollar is no longer the dominant currency of trade they will be faced with some very hard decisions... like do we need 800 military bases around the world?

F-35s are destroying their military... the more they buy the better.

Retiring is exactly the right word... in fact premature retirement is a better description... much like the first tranche Typhoons being scrapped because it is cheaper to scrap them and make brand new later model versions than it is to upgrade them... and ironically I think they might find the same issue with F-35s as they eventually get around to working out some of its bugs that might require rather significant changes and upgrades and improvements... a lot of the already produced aircraft might end up getting scrapped despite costing so much in the first place.... of course that is why they call it the bleeding edge of technology... it is the leading edge, but it is expensive and can hurt when you get it wrong... because it is very unlikely you will always get it right.

The situation for the US and the west would look OK if the F-35 was an Su-75 type aircraft that is modern and sophisticated but cheap to buy and cheap to operate in numbers because it is a numbers aircraft.

Of course the US F-35 can never be that because they don't have a heavy more capable Su-57 to operate with it... they simply don't have enough F-22s for the job when they ended production and it is even worse now... so the F-35 is being the Su-57 and Su-75 and that is why it is so expensive and most of the capabilities don't work properly yet.

When they started talking about the F-22 they wanted 1,500 aircraft, but the end of the cold war it was cut to half... 750 they wanted... they ended up with 189 because the Russian AF was finished and the Chinese AF was a joke... mostly 3rd gen ex soviet types by number... with a couple of Flankers to look modern... if you could time travel from the mid 1990s to now it would be like a totally different planet. I remember talking to American teenagers who were convinced by 2010 Europe and the US would have thousands of F-35s in service and the Russians will have bought the hand me down F-16s and be flying those because they could no longer make their own aircraft. That was the American dream... third world gas station with nukes...

If you don't believe me watch Terminator 2... when the kid is told by the terminator that Skynet will launch nuclear weapons at Russia the kid asks why they would do that... they are our friends now... The response of course is to get them to launch a full scale nuclear attack on the west which would essentially to get the human race to wipe out much of the human race... of course the machines would have suffered more than humans with lack of power and raw materials, even if the automated factories were fully intact and unharmed they are not fully automated and able to run on their own. Ask an American kid these days about nuking Russia and they will get excited and say... go for it....

Back on topic...

This J-35 looks like a much better aircraft... the shape is slimmer and would probably allow much higher flight speed.... if you look at the F-35 and the J-35 it is like the difference between the MiG-29 and F-16... the F16 has a huge very powerful but also very expensive engine, but its fixed air intake limits its top speed to mach 2, while the smaller less powerful engines in the MiG-29 add up to more thrust, and when they improve the thrust they get double the effect. An extra 1 ton of thrust for the engine means two tons extra thrust for the aircraft...

The J-35 might be inferior in some respects to the F-35 but I would rather expect it would be what the F-35 was supposed to be... a light affordable numbers fighter bomber... and problems will be fixed...