China’s Stealth Design Cribbed from Downed U.S. Jet?January 28, 2011
 China's prototype stealth fighter jet, which had a test flight just hours before Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with China's President Hu Jintao a few weeks ago, might be built on pilfered U.S. designs, according to an article in The New York Times. Admiral Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia's military chief of staff during the Kosovo war in the 1990s, told the Associated Press that the Chinese had built their technology for the J-20 from an F-117 Nighthawk that had been shot down during the war. The wreckage of the stealth jet fighter, the first ever to be shot down, was strewn across a wide swath of farmland just outside of Belgrade. Domazet-Loso told the AP that Chinese agents had studied the crash site and had gone as far as buying pieces of the downed jet from area farmers. But the Pentagon said that it is not clear whether China used information gleaned from the downed American jet to build it its prototype. Officials, however, said that they doubted the Chinese could have found much useful information from the wreckage. "At this point, it's hard to imagine that a great deal of applicable and useful information could have been culled from the side," one Air Force official, who asked for anonymity, told the Times. Chinese defense officials told Chinese state news that China had built the new J-20 stealth fighter by adopting "technological innovations," according to the Times, adding that the jet was not copied from American designs. Suspicions were fanned in late January, however, when a federal judge in Hawaii sentenced a former American stealth bomber engineer, Noshir Gowadia, to 32 years in prison for selling missile technology to China, the Times reported. American officials noted that while China's J-20 might look like the U.S. F-22 Raptor—the most advanced stealth fighter in the American arsenal—China's 15-minute test flight proved nothing about its capabilities. "The fact that it flew doesn't have anything to do with stealth," a Pentagon spokesman told the Times. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Lance Cheung) |
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