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In January 2011, while U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Beijing, China’s Chengdu J-20 made its maiden flight, a test that seemed to surprise even President Hu Jintao when Gates raised it. Known in China as the Weilong, or Mighty Dragon, and to NATO as Fagin, the jet is over 69 feet long, with a blended fuselage and diverterless supersonic inlets that use a fixed bump to slow incoming air and hide the engine fan blades from radar. Its forward canards sit on the same plane as the main wings to limit radar returns, and flight control software keeps the deliberately unstable airframe in the air while managing the canards’ radar profile. In peacetime it carries a Luneburg lens to enlarge its radar signature and hide its true one.

Early J-20s entered service around 2017 with Russian AL-31 engines, then the domestic WS-10C around 2019, while engineers worked through turbine blade metallurgy for the Shenyang WS-15. By 2023 and 2024 the WS-15 reached mass production, giving roughly 180 kilonewtons of thrust, supercruise and thrust vectoring. The jet has no gun and is built for beyond-visual-range combat with PL-15 and PL-10 missiles. The twin-seat J-20S adds a back-seat officer to direct drone wingmen, and by mid-2026 China had an estimated 500 airframes across all five theater commands, ending the U.S. monopoly on operational stealth fighters.

• Side bays swing PL-10 missiles out on a rail and close their doors before firing to keep the belly sealed.
• A non-stealth configuration with external pylons adds up to eight more missiles or drop tanks.
• A distributed aperture system stitches infrared cameras into a 360-degree view in the pilot’s helmet.
• Production runs at roughly $100 million per unit, according to the sources.
• U.S. Pacific Air Forces have confirmed close encounters between F-35s and J-20s over the East and South China Seas.