Design & role analysis of China’s other 6th gen fighter, the Shenyang combat jet

In late December 2024, very blurry images of China's advanced planes appeared. Back then, China flew two different next generation fighter designs. But this plane made by Shen Yun Aircraft Corporation got its limelight stolen quickly by the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation's design. Dubbed the J-36 seen here, it simply had much better images and videos at the time. Months passed, though, and more and more images and videos of this Shen Yun's design emerged as well. Multiple test flights performed in the meantime also helped. So now, some ten months after its first flight, there have been enough visual materials accumulated that Binkov feels confident enough to do a preliminary analysis of the design, size and its possible future role in China's armed forces. Next generation fighter jets don't work without powerful AI. Same goes for our sponsor, Plod AI. I just got their Plod Note assistant. Click clickety click. This thing sticks to everything. 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Check out Plod AI at the link below the video, or scan the QR code. It just might boost your productivity too. Use my code BINCOP to get a discount. 20% off. As can be observed from the videos and images, the plane features a wide nose, novel twin underbelly intakes, a fairly sizable fuselage, a lambda wing, twin engines with F-22 style nozzles and all-moving wingtips. The plane lacks any vertical tail surfaces. Its cockpit sits fairly low and the plane appears to be a single seater. So let's go over all those again, in greater detail. A quick digression. Chengdu's prototype had an actual serial written on it, reading 36011. J-20 prototypes used a similar format serial and the plane was named J-20. Hence the J-36 moniker for Chengdu's design. Which is mind you, not official. But it looks like a decent guess. Shen Yun's prototype has no serial visible nor has any name been officially associated with it. At times you will see J-50 used for it, but right now that's basically just a rumor. So we'll keep referring to it as Shen Yun's plane. The nose is wider than that of F-22. Seemingly more flat than tall, but still not as wide as one observed on the J-36. It has distinct chines along the edges and its tip has a visible wedge. Sort of like YF-23 and even the recent artistic renders of the future US F-47. Such design choices should make the nose of the plane pretty stealthy, though of course without detailed info on the materials used, talking about stealth is way premature. But already with all else being equal, stealth levels should be improved over those of the Chinese J-20. The plane uses a tricycle landing gear arrangement. Single wheel main landing gear suggests the plane's weight is not as extreme as J-36's which uses double wheel arrangement. But we will cover weight a bit later. Curiously, the front landing gear uses twin wheel arrangement. That in itself doesn't tell much about the weights as the front gear usually supports fairly little weight. It could simply be that the two smaller wheels fits better in the insides of the plane than a single bigger one. But curiously, the front landing gear is positioned quite close to the center of mass of the plane. More so than on other planes, like F-22. Such placement should enable easier rotation and a bit shorter takeoffs. Of course, it's all interconnected when it comes to plane design. The front landing gear simply couldn't have been placed more forward as then it would obstruct airflow into the intakes too much. Also, intake lips themselves couldn't have started more forward either, without compromising inlet area, meaning amount of air being fed into the engines. More powerful engines require more air. Moving the intakes more forward isn't necessary either as right now they're about as long as those on the F-22. With presumably enough room for enough stable airflow at wide range of speeds, like with the F-22. And with enough room for the intakes to curve inside the fuselage, which benefits stealth. The wing is, as said, of lambda design. Even though the idea itself is not novel, such wings are more complex to make and structurally not as sturdy. But with advances in manufacturing, we're seeing more and more of them used. BAE's Tempest demo plane was to have such wing, before the plane was refocused on range and greater fuel allowance. Boeing's Ghostbat drone uses such a wing. Both B-2 and B-21 use, in effect, lambda wings. And so on. Lambda wings should generally have better low speed handling and somewhat shorter takeoff runs and subsonic maneuverability, without really compromising supersonic performance. Shen Yun's plane shows off greater wingsweep, compared to either F-22 or J-20. It's roughly equal to Chengdu J-36's wingsweep angle. The wingsweep might enable the plane to accelerate a bit more easily or even attain a higher speed, but many other factors are in play here, like engine power, inlet shape and so on. Speaking of inlets, it's worth mentioning that the inlets are quite novel. They're not of carrot type as on F-22, nor do they feature a worthless supersonic bump like the F-35 or J-20. They lack any visible splitter surface, which would otherwise redirect the unwanted boundary air layer so it doesn't enter the inlet. Closest thing to this inlet is the inlet system used on the YF-23 demo plane. That one used a boundary layer control system which sucked in the slow boundary layer air through a system of small holes. Benefit of all that was a simpler and lighter inlet. And one without a radar signature trap. F-22's inlet, for example, had its inlets offset from the fuselage to create sort of a splitter for the boundary layer air, but then had to rely on heavy usage of radar absorbing material to mitigate the not so stealthy inlet gap. This Shen Yun's plane and YF-23 are the rare designs which rely on said method exclusively, suggesting more advanced inlets. Shen Yun's plane inlets also feature triangular inlet geometry not seen on any other combat plane in recent decades. Another novel design solution the plane uses are all-moving wingtips. This may be the only example of a combat aircraft using said feature. One can observe fairly big fairings for the actuator near the wingtips. They seem to be there to move both the ailerons and the wingtips. Now, such articulated wingtips, especially on a big wingspan plane like this, should enable some very high roll rates. But that's not all. Both Lockheed Martin and Boeing looked into such wingtips before and besides the roll input, they found that excellent yaw control can also be achieved using them, from low to very high angle of attack values. Controllability at high angle of attack and quick pitch up are one of the most important maneuver qualities modern planes desire. Since the plane is tailless, its lateral stability would be very finicky without a good system. All-moving tails may help there. And maybe a more advanced solution than the split flaps seen on the J36. Now, when it comes to length and wingspan, it's fairly hard to assess those. But we will still try, using several images. This first one may actually be a fake image. It appeared even a few days before the alleged first flight day. But in case it's not, it's the only image with an object that can be used as a size reference. In this instance, that's a J16 chase plane. Knowing its length, the Shen Yun's plane may be estimated at 22 to 22 and a half meters long. That's very long. But it's not necessarily correct. We can use these images to compare it with the F-22. Of course, this is more like a vibe comparison operating under the assumption that the engines are of similar thrust and that their nozzles are of similar width. That may not necessarily be true. Still, it's unlikely the difference would be huge. There's also the issue of inadequate resolution and slightly different angle at which the planes have been photographed. But still, overall comparison seems to point at a length of some 20 meters and wingspan of some 17 to 18 meters. That's not all. This image also shows the weapon bay lines. Now, there's no way of knowing how long the weapon bays are. But if we assume they were modeled around medium range missiles, then J20 and F-22 weapon bay comparisons give out some interesting figures. When we compare Shen Yun's plane with the J20 and we assume the same dimensions of weapon bay doors, the following figures appear. Now, why would we even use weapon bays for sizing the plane up? Because missiles are fairly standard. US made a successor to AMRAAM and it left it at the same length and diameter. China's PL-15 shares the same body with its predecessor, PL-12. Changing missile sizes for the new, more advanced missile is often more hassle than it's worth, due to the logistics of compatibility of the new shape with the entire fleet of planes a country has. China's most widely used air to air missile is PL-15. While a newer variant may come eventually, it's not assured its size would change. Indeed, a future sub variant of the PL-15 has already been shown, featuring the same body size, but using folding fins. PL-15 itself is four meters long. Here you can see four in J20's weapon bays. There's quite a bit of clearance left both in front and behind the missiles. In a way, J20's bay may have been sized up to accept even some bigger weapons, but that remains to be seen. F-22's bays are more crammed. They hold six AMRAAMs. While shorter, AMRAAMs are arranged in a staggered formation, using up a greater length and saving on width. Basically, they feature even less clearance around them compared to J20's bay. Now, on its own, Shen Yun's plane might not fare as well if its bays were indeed sized around non-staggered PL-15. That would mean all the other oversized weapons would not fit. But China has other planes. J20's are still gonna be produced to 2030s or so, and there are gonna be maybe over a thousand of them. J20's may offer a slightly bigger weapon base. But there's also the J36, which has weapon bays sized around the PL-17 missile, which is close to six meters long. So China will have lots of other options for internal carriage of oversized weapons, which allows the Shen Yun's design to be super focused on its role. Sure, nowadays every plane is really a multi-role plane. But Shen Yun's plane seems more optimized towards pure air to air combat than the J36. That doesn't mean J36 is not a fighter. It is, as per words of a US air force general. It's just that it has a broader role set. While Shen Yun's plane is closer to the F-22 in its role, optimized for pure air to air combat. Images so far have not suggested Shen Yun's fighter has very large optical sensor windows, like the J36 does. There's only so much room for various sensors one can put on a plane. And if indeed both fighter types are present in a formation, then it makes sense not to have the same sensors on all planes present. Using combination, the two Chinese fighter designs might be quite potent. It's also quite apparent that the plane doesn't have any other weapon bays. The panels on the side of the intake are too short even for the three meter long PL-10 infrared missile. Said panels are more likely covering some sensors. In tomorrow's air combat, it's unlikely short range missiles would get used often by manned planes, which will act as command nodes. Remember, there are to be numerous unmanned loyal wingmen in the formation, which might more often face combat at short range, depending on their stealth level. That's also why a plausible loadout of six PL-15 sized weapons with foldable fins might be enough for the Shen Yun's plane. The loyal wingmen surrounding the plane would carry additional weapons. And the J36 might also be present in the back, lobbying long range missiles. Engines are of course a mystery. Though it's plausible the planned engine, at least in the first decade or so of the plane's service, is WS-15 based. That's the engine recently put into mass production for the J-20. Given that the latest WS-10 engine variants approached 140 kilonewtons of thrust, it's plausible the WS-15 is in the 160 to 180 kilonewton range. But we don't know. The engine obviously has a nozzle roughly similar to one found on the F-22. Indicating vectored thrust. Potentially even in lateral direction, to compensate for no tails. And it should somewhat help with radar return as well. In the more distant future, the plane may receive variable cycle engines, as that's a tech that China has also been exploring. Said engines would be good at both subsonic and supersonic speeds. Today's engines are forced to choose one regime, generally the supersonic one, so they can go supersonic without afterburners. But that still uses up a lot of fuel. Amount of fuel carried is of course unknown. But we are talking about a pretty big plane. Not just length and wingspan wise. But one can see that the is at least as wide as raptors. If not a bit wider. There are of course those large wings and a much much bigger nose. Shen Yun's plane shaves some weight in the rear section, with no tails present. But overall, we're still likely talking about a fairly heavy aircraft. That's actually also suggested by the size of its main landing gear. The wheels are visibly bigger than those on the F-22. And remember, the raptor is a 38 ton class plane. Given the possibly more powerful engines and much more novel construction methods, potentially yielding a lighter construction, Shen Yun's plane might enjoy a better empty to max takeoff weight ratio. More details about the Shen Yun's plane design will surely leak out in the future, but most of its secrets may not be known for a few more years. While the underlying assumption is that both J-36 and this plane are mature designs ready for testing and future production, that both will see service. There's a slight possibility that we're looking at two competing designs though, of which only one will go into service. Though Binkov still believes there's enough benefit from their differences to warrant both designs reaching service. What's apparent though is the maturity of the design. It's not a crude cobbled up demonstrator plane, like the original project 31 plane. Or many US demo planes. In recent years, the focus both in China and the US is to compete with mature designs that can be put into production quickly. So we may not have to wait quite until 2030 to see what will happen with this mystery plane. And even more interestingly, by then the US F-47 should fly as well. So even more detailed comparisons should be possible.