China has revealed pictures of its first stealth fighter jet on a Chinese non-governmental Web site of a prototype of the Chengdu J-20 fighter being built for the Chinese air force.
Chinese aviation experts say they have been snapping pictures of the aircraft since it took to taxi tests ahead of its first flight test in the coming weeks.
But is the sighting for real? Some experts claim the photos are fake or simply Photoshopped fighters created on computer screens.
Questions also arise over the unusually large Chinese red star painted on the tail.
“The red star insignias are normally smaller with parallel adjacent red bands,” Defense News reported.
Other experts, though, say they believe the jet is genuine and long overdue.
“China has the money, they have the industrial expertise, they have the scientific base, the drive and motivation and of course the benefit of American research over 30 years acquired by legal or illegal means,” one anonymous observer was quoted by a Time magazine blog site. “These enablers give China wide latitude in matching or exceeding American designs that are now 20 years old.”
The photos show the J-20 with a canard-delta twin-engine configuration, diverter-less supersonic intakes and a shaped nose that is consistent with the use of active electronically scanned array radar, the Defense News Web site reported.
