China’s J-36 design team unveils aircraft carrier landing system for sixth-gen stealth jet

The tri-engine, tailless flying-wing behemoth sent shock waves through global defence circles when it was spotted in December soaring over the mega city of Chengdu in southwest China. A paper published last month in China’s top aviation journal, the peer-reviewed Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica, showed that the J-36 design team is in the early stages of making a naval variant suitable for use with the PLA Navy’s growing fleet of aircraft carriers. Tao Chenggang, deputy chief designer of the AVIC Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute, said in the paper that the risk to pilots trying to land a sixth-generation plane on a carrier was “extremely high”.

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