In less than 24 hours, two Chinese aircraft manufacturers unveiled new stealth fighter demonstrators on Thursday. And not just any protesters. The separate designs from aircraft makers Chengdu and Shenyang may be among the most advanced manned fighters ever.

The Chinese military traditionally unveils major new technologies at the end of the Western calendar year in December or January. Perhaps most famously, the People’s Liberation Army circulated the first images of Chengdu’s J-20 stealth fighter online in January 2011. Thirteen years later, hundreds of J-20s could be in frontline service with the People’s Liberation Army Air Force.

This year’s surprise was among the most dramatic for the PLA’s public relations machine. Around the same time Thursday, videos appeared online showing two different manned stealth fighter demonstrators in flight. The Chengdu model had a J-20 escort. The Shenyang type flew alongside a Shenyang-made Sukhoi Su-27 clone.

Both new species are tailless deltas. Their wings and all control surfaces appear to lie in the same horizontal plane. This can reduce a fighter’s radar signature – but at a cost. “Such vehicles are known to be aerodynamically complex aircraft with distinct flight dynamics characteristics and complicated flight control laws,” a team wrote in a 2007 report for the U.S. Air Force Flight Test Center.

It is clear that the PLAAF is determined to acquire an extremely stealthy fighter with complex flight controls – and it is not taking any chances. The Air Force’s two major fighter aircraft manufacturers are both working on designs. One could succeed where the other fails and still provide an important warfighting capability.

The Chinese military took the same approach with its first generation of stealth fighters. Chengdu’s supersonic twin-engine J-20 performed as planned – and the PLAAF ended up ordering a large number. But if the J-20 had failed, there was an alternative: the lighter Shenyang J-35, which first flew in 2012 and may yet enter front-line service as a naval carrier fighter.

Thursday’s unveiling was significant, but it was also partly a marketing triumph. It’s worth noting that the US Air Force tested what is believed to be a tailless demonstrator back in 2020 as part of its troubled Next Generation Air Dominance program. “NGAD has gotten to the point where the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world,” said Will Roper, then Air Force acquisitions director.

While the USAF hid its new stealth fighter demonstrator, the PLAAF proudly presented its two new demonstrators. What happens next depends on how well the demonstrators actually perform under the strain of rigorous use in a real-world context — and how many billions of dollars Beijing is willing to invest in one or both designs.

One or both demonstrators could become multirole fighters with serious air-to-air capability. But they could also function as stealthy ground attack aircraft. “The PLAAF is developing new medium- and long-range stealth bombers to attack regional and global targets,” the Pentagon noted in the latest edition of its annual report on the Chinese military.

The long-range stealth bomber, the Xi’an H-20 flying wing, is still in development and may not be unveiled to the public for several years. The medium-range stealth bomber, the so-called JH-XX, was something of a mystery.

Could Thursday’s surprise protesters evolve into medium bombers? It is possible.

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