Just a year ago, Chinese authorities hinted that their future aircraft carriers equipped with catapults would implement a naval version of the J-20 fighter which equips the country's air force. However, several Chinese aviation industry experts doubted this statement, and claimed that it would be a derivative version of the Shenyang FC-31 stealth fighter that would arm these ships. Over the month, several redundant information have come to give substance to these suspicions, even giving it a name, the J-35.
There is very little information available on the subject, and for good reason, as China is not particularly keen to make it a media subject, for the moment at least. We can only extrapolate information from the two FC-31 prototypes, one of them having participated in the Dubai Air Show in 2015. Thus, unlike the J-20, the J-35 would be a medium fighter, with a maximum take-off mass of class 25 to 28 tonnes, where the J-20, in its version operated from a land base, exceeds 36 tonnes. The J-35 would therefore evolve in the same category as the Rafale French or the American F35C, making it possible to operate more aircraft from the limited space of a hangar and an aircraft carrier flight deck. Like the French plane, it is based on a twin-engine architecture, more robust in maritime overflight, but like the American plane, it was designed for optimized stealth, even if it will probably not reach that of the Lighting II.
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