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Chinese Aviation History - Designing New Types of Aircraft

Since the 1960s China successfully designed a supersonic attack aircraft Q-5 and high altitude high speed fighter J-8. Although JJ-1 aircraft and its engine designed in the late 1950s and the Primary Trainer CJ-6 in the 1960s were certified for batch production, the design work at that time was in the initial stage with little experience. The smooth copy production of several types of aircraft had given people a false impression that the design of aircraft and engine was not that complicated. People had no personal experience to the fact that design should be based on the previous accumulated research and technical base. This lack of understanding of the design law plus the prevailing atmosphere of the "Great Leap Forward" caused people to put undue emphasis on what is new, neglecting practical possibility. It was just under this situation that the unpractical, too high target of design performance of the East Wind 113 came out. Design of the Q-5 aircraft also started in the late 1950s and was more or less influenced by that situation.

The development of Q-5 aircraft was done in the Nanchang Aircraft Factory and its chief designer was Lu Xiaopeng. When the design started in August 1958, its design concept was defined of good low altitude performances, manoeuvrability, surprise attack and ground attack according to the Air Force requirement. After 20 months hard and arduous work, the prototype aircraft was trial produced in May 1960. When the whole country entered in the stage of adjustment in 1961, the Q-5 faced the problem of being "abandoned". The factory decided to continue the work by "making use of every bit of time" , which won the support from the Air Force, the MAI and the CAE. The first aircraft was flight tested in June 1965. After design certification its small batch trial production started at the end of the year. Further modifications were carried out from 1968 to 1969 to get rid of the problems found out by the Air Force. After those modifications, the aircraft was praised by pilots and was deemed as a fairly good attack aircraft. At the end of 1969, the government approved its batch production. Ten years of hard work filled the blank of China's supersonic jet attack aircraft. This was a good aircraft successfully designed by China. Having tempered in activities of the design of the primary train-er CJ-6 and Q-5 aircraft, the Nanchang Aircraft Factory had formed a capable and powerful aircraft design team, which was a far reaching achievement than the successful design of one or two types of aircraft.

At the same time of developing the Q-5 aircraft, design of another aircraft was also started. When the CAE was set up in 1961, it was stressed to draw lessons from the failures of the East Wind 113 and thoroughly study MiG-21, i.e. J-7, step by step and to design a new type of aircraft with better performance, i.e. the J-8 fighter according to the requirement of the Military Commission of CCCPC. Design of this new type of aircraft was taken place in the Shenyang Aircraft Design Institute with Huang Zhiqian, and later, Gu Songfen as its chief designer. Based on the copy production experience of the J-7, designers had fully understood all characteristics of this aircraft and they also studied and analysed documents of foreign fighters obtained, therefore, a comprehensive understanding of design principle, specification, standard, material and process of supersonic fighter at Mach 2 level was gained.

Designers had basically mastered methods of design, calculation and test of high altitude, high speed fighter. On this basis, the fighting objective was defined and specification of the new fighter J-8 was worked out according to the Air Force requirement. After the objective was defined, four large scale investigations in Air Force were made, and more than 6,000 pieces of suggestions were collected and, 73 items with 11,000 times of wind tunnel tests and 500 items of various kinds of structure and system tests were performed specially for the J-8 aircraft. The design philosophy did not stress on "all new", but on the right selection of new technologies that were available through efforts. On the critical issue of power plant selection, aircraft designers did not stick to the planned high performance engine, but adopted WP7A engine, the thrust of which could be increased after modification. This decision helped the smooth development of the aircraft.

The J-8 high altitude high speed fighter design was finished in 1966 and the first flight of the J-8 aircraft was made in July 1969. It was really not easy to send the new aircraft into the sky during the years of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" . The J-8 development group still continued their work in the great turmoil and disorder. The flying of J-8 aircraft marked a new era of China's aviation industry.