Posted on 11/07/2018 6:42:01 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
China's J-10 fighter is now equipped with thrust vectoring controls that allow the jet to perform seemingly impossible aerial maneuvers. This long-rumored upgrade to a well-known jet fighter made its debut at the Zhuhai Air Show.
The Chengdu J-10 “Vigorous Dragon” is a single-engine fighter developed for China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (the Chinese Air Force). The J-10 falls in the same general category as the American F-16, and the two planes even share the same DNA, as the Chinese jet was built with Israeli assistance from Israel’s F-16-based Lavi fighter. However, in some technological respects, the China's plane is about fifteen years behind the F-16 platform, and even further behind modern fighters like the F-35.
Even so, the J-10 now has something the F-16 does not: thrust vectoring control capability that pushes its maneuverability into the stratosphere. The jet is able to steer its exhaust, allowing it to point its nose in one direction but actually propel itself in another.
In traditional airplanes, the direction of the engines dictate the direction of the aircraft. Engines are pointed forward, so airplanes goes forward. Pilots use traditional control systems—rudders, elevators, flaps, ailerons, and brakes—to point the plane where they want to go.
Thrust vectoring control (TVC) turns this idea on its head. Pioneered in the U.S. in the early 1990s, TVCs change the direction of the engine exhaust, making it possible to travel in a direction other than where the engine (and plane) is actually pointed.
The result might be a plane that appears to suddenly jerk in midair, rise like a dragon, slow to a relative crawl, or perform some other impossible-looking aerial maneuver. Thanks to computer-controlled fly by wire technology that instantly turns a pilot’s control input into action, a pilot doesn’t have to perform complex calculations to get his plane to do what he wants to do. He simply does it, and the plane takes care of the rest.
Early on, this trick was accomplished with paddles that pushed into the engine exhaust to change the direction of thrust. Think of when you partially cover a garden hose nozzle with your thumb; the water still comes out, but in the opposite direction of the location of your thumb.
Modern thrust vectoring technology employs a movable thrust nozzle in place of the paddles. Using this tech, the F-22 Raptor can angle its thrust up to 24 degrees up or down. Russia began incorporating TVC into the Sukhoi Su-30 and the newer Su-35. It's also a feature of the Su-57 fifth-generation fighter. In 2017, the Su-35 performed head-exploding aerial maneuvers at an air show on the outskirts of Moscow thanks to TVC. Now China's J-10 joins this elite club of super-maneuverable fighter jets.
For months, there have been reports out of China that Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group, the developer of the J-10, was working on a TVC exhaust system for the single-engine fighter. A photograph of a J-10 with TVC emerged in January 2018, but no formal announcement was made. Finally, the TVC-equipped J-10B made its debut yesterday sporting a movable nozzle. Instead of using a thumb to control the direction of water, this garden hose pivots the entire nozzle.
According to FlightGlobal, the J-10B at the Zhuhai Air Show performed “tight vertical loops, a slow high angle of attack roll, a cobra maneuver, and the falling leaf.” Popular Mechanics covered some of these maneuvers in 2017 when a Russian Su-35 Flanker-E fighter performed them at the Zhukovsky Air Show.
The big question is where Chinese TVC goes from here. Although the U.S. tested such technology in the early 90s, it didn’t add the technology to later versions of the F-15, Super Hornet, or F-16, or even the F-35. Although TVC is useful, you can pile on only so many capabilities for a fighter, and U.S. manufacturers haven’t prioritized TVC.
China’s latest jets, the FC-31 and J-20, don’t have TVC and likely won’t ever have it. But even if TVC doesn’t make it onto future planes, Chinese aviation can claim it can keep up with the pace of technological innovation set by Russia and the West.
The “cobra” is an airshow maneuver, pure and simple. As you note, low energy in air-to-air combat (or avoiding ground threats) gets you killed. That’s a big reason Scott O’Grady was shot down by that Serbian SA-6. He used up all of his energy dodging the first two missiles; when number three popped up, he was out of energy and his ECM pod wasn’t enough to defeat the threat alone.
“IIRC, something similar was tried here and the pilots could not withstand the excessive g-force.”
Nope, nothing to do with G-force in particular. The F-22 still has thrust vectoring. It is considered less important these days because of high off-boresight missiles like the AIM-9X, which can attack targets more than 90 degrees off the nose of the aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Lavi#Design
The delta wing configuration of the Lavi is based on the preceding IAI Kfir which is itself a derivative of the delta wing French Mirage III figther.
Finally, the Chinese deny getting any technical information from the Israelis for the development of the J-10:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Lavi#China_Question
(Bookmark in the article is slightly misplaced; scroll up to see the China Question information.)
So it looks like the F-16 connection being implied in the article is tenuous at best. If I was going to look for an outside source for the J-10 design, I'd look at the Eurofighter Typhoon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurofighter_Typhoon
Just as likely the Chinese got (bought/stole) design information from Great Britain, France or Germany since they have sold the jointly produced aircraft to a number of countries.
It is worth noting where, at the end of the article, the author reports that thrust vectoring control (TVC), although developed and demonstrated for some time now, has not been broadly adopted into 4th and 5th generation jet fighter designs. It may be that, in the era of stealth, advanced radars and sensors, and long range air to air missiles, being able do a lot of fancy close-in dogfight maneuvers is outweighed by the TVCs maintenance downside (compared to regular jet engine exhaust nozzles). It is sort of a latter day jet fighter version of focusing on the WWII IJN Zero's maneuverability. Yeah, the Zero had way more maneuverability in the close-in dog fight fur ball. So what? The USN developed hit and run tactics that favored their Wildcat/Hellcat's speed, ruggedness, and firepower and effectively neutralized the Zero's maneuverability.
Harrier had thrust vectoring in the 60’s.
Yup. But don’t think it was like in modern fighters where used in combat, was it?
The Harrier was primarily an attack aircraft, it did have self defense capabilities.
The Royal Navy had success with them in the Falklands, the Argentines were at their range limit.
The term VIFF (vectoring in forward flight) came from Harriers.
They copied it from some Russian fighters they bought
Always thought the thrust-vectoring in the Harrier was for VTOL & take-off only, not for use in combat flight......
It’s primary function was VTOL, it could use VIFFing in ACM and do things no other aircraft could do.
If you have time to kill youtube has some good videos on the Harrier.
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