China’s J-10B Fighter More Advanced Than Indian Su-30, Japanese F-15J aircraft: Chinese Expert

China’s J-10B fighter is more advanced than the Su-30 and the F-15J aircraft in service with India and Japan respectively and the  3.5 generation American fighters deployed in the Asia-Pacific.

A Chinese expert quoted in China Military Online claimed that the medium-scale 3.5-generation J-10B fighter has 19 tons of maximum take-off weight, a bomb load between 6 and 8 tons, a combat radius of about 1,000 kilometres and a flight speed between 1 and 1.5 mach.

The J-10B fighter is equipped with active electronically scanning phased-array radar and is capable of carrying beyond visual range air-to-air missiles. Zhang Zhaozhong, a military expert at the National Defense University (NDU) was quoted as saying that the J-10B fighter is at least 30 per cent better than the J-10A fighter in overall performance.

The lower nose of the J-10B fighter allows pilots to have a broader field of vision, and the active phased-array radar with a diameter of about one meter mounted inside the oblate nose part of the fighter, electronic jammer and searching and tracking device mounted outside the fighter cabin, upgrade the fighter’s electronic information system performance, Zhang was quoted as saying.

In addition to short-range dogfight ammunition, the J-10B fighter can carry medium-range interception missiles with a firing range of tens of kilometres, and at the same time, it is capable of attacking ground targets.

Therefore, its combat effectiveness is upgraded with an overall performance improvement of over 30 percent as compared with that of the J-10A fighter, Zhang introduced.

The active phased-array radar with the electronic scanning capability, installed on the J-10B fighter, is “just like 2,000 eyes equipped with telescopes in a one-square-meter radar area”. Its medium-range interception missiles have a firing range between 70 and 80 kilometres. “The J-10B fighter can not only undertake the territorial air defence tasks, but also carry out active attack,” Zhang was quoted as saying.

The fighter currently uses the AF-31F engine imported from Russia but future models could be equipped with the locally produced ‘Taihang’ engine.