The paper trail on the secretive Xian H-20 had gone cold for a couple years, but recent comments from a PLAAF general suggest the program is coming along. Aviation Week experts dissect what was said and look at where the bomber would fit in China's air force structure. 

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Transcript

Guy Norris:

Welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast. I'm Guy Norris, senior editor, and I'm here with my Aviation Week colleagues, defense editor, Steve Trimble and senior program analyst, Matt Jouppi. Stealth aircraft programs are by definition deliberately shrouded in obscurity from every aspect, be it technical, programmatic, or operational. And that's just for the western programs that we're familiar with. Add to that the impenetrability of China's military industrial aerospace complex, and this gives you an idea of the challenges facing Steve and Matt today as they attempt to dissect with me the Xi'an H-20 stealth bomber. Steve, I'll start with you if you don't mind. Why are we talking about the H-20 today?

Steve Trimble:

Well, thank you Guy. I mean, it's always a great day to talk about the H-20 in our business, but we do have an excuse to talk about it because in the last... it was about almost a month ago, we got the first official statement from a Chinese government, and in this case military official talking about the H-20 itself. And it's really the first time that's actually happened. If you go back to 2016, that was when the PLAAF commander Ma Xiaotian actually announced that they were developing a long-range bomber. He didn't call it the H-20. It was widely presumed that they needed sort of a bomber version in that 20 series that started with the Z-20 attack helicopter. And then we saw the J-20 stealth fighter, and then of course the Y-20 strategic airlifter. There was always speculation that there would have to be an H-20, a hōng, a hōng means bomber in Chinese, loosely speaking.

General Xiaotian appeared to confirm that in that 2016 statement. We haven't heard a whole lot since then. There's been sort of hints and the AVIC, the defense manufacturer in China has touted it in advertisements with a sort of a shrouded flying wing type aircraft under a curtain kind of cribbing or stealing a little bit from Northrop Super Bowl ad before the B-21 was unveiled, something very similar in that motif. But since then, I mean it's been pretty quiet other than AVIC saying that it was coming soon. I think that was in 2019 or so. There just hasn't been any further updates five years on. But that changed officially on March 11th, and that was during the national Two Sessions event in Beijing. Just to give you the context there, that's the concurrent annual plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party. That includes the session of the National People's Congress together with something called the CPPCC, which is the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

A member of that conference is Lieutenant General Wang Wei, who is the deputy commander of the People's Liberation Army Air Force or PLAAF. So he was made available to reporters sort of on the sidelines of that event. And a reporter that has only been identified by the publication, the Hong Kong Commercial Daily Newspaper. They only identify the reporter as Muzi or Muzzi, M-U-Z-I in English letters. Asked the general about the H-20 and said, "When are you going to announce the H-20?" Again, this is something that the Chinese government has not officially talked about in those terms yet, but in this case, according to the video, which you can see online on the Hong Kong commercial dailies' website, the general answered him. And this was General Wang's response, and he said, "Soon you'll see because it's going to be based on a technical process." There was some follow up questions including from the same Hong Kong commercial daily reporter, the first being, "There's talk from foreign media that we've hit a technical bottleneck with the implication, is that true or do you have any statement?"

And the general replied, "There's no bottleneck. It has all been solved. We have very good researchers now, all of them are capable of this." And there's a bit more of a back and forth. And then the reporter says, "How long after its debut will it be before it goes into full service or mass production?" And the general replies, "Soon or straight after." So that would imply, that little bit of information if we took it literally that sounds like they're not waiting for the H-20, they're not going to roll it out and then go into flight test. The way he phrased that, it sounds like they're going to go through all that process first in secret and then roll it out and then go immediately into service. But we have to be careful about interpreting this stuff because obviously he said soon, and that's the same word they used five years ago when they said we'd be seeing the H-20. They said, "It's coming soon." And if five years is their definition of soon, it could take a while.

So we have to be careful about how we interpret that. But at the same time, it'd be interesting if that's the case. And there's a bit more of... a couple more follow-ups. A reporter says, "After the H-20, how do we compare our strength with that of the United States?" General Wang replies, "We don't compare ourselves to the US, we're just defending ourselves." And that leads to the follow-up question, "So we can achieve a technological leapfrog?" And General Wang replies, "We'll all see then." So not the most responsive reply to that question, but at least it gives us a little more to go on. For a while there I was wondering, have they shelved this project? Has it been delayed? Is something going wrong? Just because there had been so much speculation say in that 2019, 2020 time period, and then no updates ever since. So this at least gives us a little more momentum to keep talking about this and wondering what it's going to be like.

Guy Norris:

So I mean, obviously we've been covering this business long enough to know how big a challenge stealth developments are in general, but particularly on bomber scale. You're talking about a whole different scale obviously of that challenge. Before we delve into some of the speculation, because let's face it's all speculation really at this point, on the technical aspects of that. I want to turn to Matt at this point because obviously there are some aspects, at least in a contextual environment, where we can look at where the H-20 would fit potentially into the People Liberation Army Air Force structure. So Matt, maybe you could describe perhaps the context of that. And more importantly, what do we think we know about where it could be used and what sort of role? So Matt, over to you.

Matt Jouppi:

To just go from the US side of things. The US Air Force views the stealth bomber in providing three main capabilities. So the first is the ability to hit sanctuary targets in heavily defended areas, particularly mobile or pop-up threats. The second is the mass delivery of precision guided munitions primarily stand in munitions, which is seen as important for sustained great power conflict. Typically, the exquisite standoff munitions are procured in only limited quantities. So for example, the latest budget from the force states, they want to procure over 8,000 JASSM stealthy cruise missiles at a total cost of more than $12.5 billion. For that same amount of money, there are force plants to procure over 43,000 small diameter bomb ones and over 360,000 joint direct attack munitions.

So that really shows you the kind of cost imbalance between a $1.5 million stealthy cruise missile and a $60,000 small diameter bomb one. And then the third of key role in the US context is the delivery of oversized munitions such as penetrators, such as the 30,000 pound massive ordnance penetrator. But China largely views its bomber force differently. Currently, the current H-6 force of over 230 bombers, including over 140 modernized bombers with improved engines, acts as a cruise missile force in the land attack mission, as well as an anti-surface warfare mission. The H-6 derived from the Soviet Tu-16 bomber has relatively short range compared to true bombers such as the B-52 and B-2. So the latest DOD report on China has discussed ranges of around 10,000 kilometers for H-20. So this would provide the People's Liberation Army Air Force, PLAAF, with additional options and striking second island range targets such as those in the Marianas like Guam and Tinian.

Presently, the intermediate range ballistic missile force of F-26s is kind of the primary go-to strike option for those farther afield targets. But with H-20, you could see it as not an either or proposition, that both assets could compliment each other and make them more effective. For example, you could foresee a simultaneous attack of H-20s with cruise missiles being launched in concert with F-26s to overcome the defenses at Guam. Presently, the PLAAF lacks a survivable stand-in platform for the delivery of those PGMs that I was talking about in mass. Presently, they have J-20. But I think given the aircraft's design, the shaping of its weapons base, how it's discussed by the PLAAF and what types of platforms it's been replacing currently, pretty definitively shows that it's an air dominance platform and thought of in that that way.

So there isn't presently an analog to the B-2 or F-35 and PLAAF service, but that may change soon. Currently, the kind of ground attack mission is performed by the older JH-7, as well as the newer J-16, which is a Su-30 derivative. But if you look at the Su-34 losses in Ukraine in which Russia has attempted to do low altitude penetration with Su-34, that shows the limitations of perhaps of a non-stealthy strike aircraft, even accounting for the J-16 and JH-7 being armed with KD-88. And KD-88, a cruise missiles with the stay-at-off range of around a hundred nautical miles is perhaps not that survivable or sustainable. The 2023 DOD China report lists an inventory of 2,800 missiles up through the intermediate range ballistic missile class, not including ICBMs. Notably, that doesn't include our launch cruise missiles.

And while on paper that seems like a lot of missiles for context, Russia has launched over 7,400 missiles of all types in Ukraine through the end of 2023. So that kind of shows the enormous expenditure rates of missions in a major war. And then the final component is the H-20's prominent role likely in really fleshing out the Chinese triad. So since 2020, China has made enormous investments in building up its nuclear deterrent from a minimal force structure to one perhaps more fitting of its great power status, more akin to the United States and Russia. We've seen the construction of hundreds of new land-based ICBM missile fields, the continued investment in the sea-based deterrent. And while H-20 predates the latest kind of nuclear arms buildup, the fact that this buildup has occurred perhaps can change how H-20 will be used in the force structure as its more survivable delivery platform then the H-6.

Guy Norris:

Yeah. Okay, Matt, thanks for that. I mean, Steve, let's look at the enormity of this project from a Chinese standpoint for a moment. I mean, it's no understatement to say that this is, if it's all... if we can believe what we've hearing the most ambitious aircraft project possibly ever undertaken in that country. After all in terms of heritage, all we know that they have to fall back on in anything like this scale from a military perspective is the venerable H-6 really. A design based going back to the Soviet era, Tupolev 16 all the way back to the 1950s. It's astonishing. So can we sort of throw a few ideas out there about what in fact the H-20 could be and what we're looking at? I mean a flying wing or that sort of classic B-2, B-21 type profile is the popular version that we've been hearing about, isn't it?

Steve Trimble:

Well, sure, and I mean it's not just speculation. That is how AVIC, the manufacturer, presumably it's the Xi'an subsidiary that also produced the other bombers in China. That's how they've portrayed it as a flying wing. That's how it's been portrayed in the Pentagon's reports to Congress, their annual China military power report. Over the years, they've been very consistent about that and of course that implies some pretty significant technological challenges for them to rise up to to get this fielded. Whether it's Jack Northrop or the Horten Brothers, going back to the 1930s, flying wings had been around for a long time. They didn't become really practical until the computerized flight controls were able to overcome that issue of adverse yaw control, where in a bank the nose wants to go in a different direction than the rest of the aircraft, which is always problematic and was very problematic for the YB-49 back in the late '40s and early '50s.

But computerized flight controls allow them to smooth that out using a differential aileron and differential wingtip control surfaces in the absence of a vertical stabilizer. Now, China's been going through a progression of those issues of designs and getting those aerodynamic controls figured out on smaller aircraft. We've all seen here in aviation, we've been tracking the progress of programs like the GJ-11, the Sharp Sword UAV, several more flying wing UAVs. I was at Airshow China in Zhuhai in 2018 when they brought out the mock-up of the CH-7, the Cai Hong 7 UAV. I talked to the chief engineer and he was very explicit about, "Yes, we decided to take a look at the Northrop Grumman X-47 and try to get as close as possible to that so that we didn't have to reinvent everything to learn how to do this." It was very upfront about that.

So they've been working on that part of it. There's a whole other level of technological progress has to be made with radar observant materials for a stealthy design like that. It's not just the plan form, you also have to bake in the special materials that soak up the electrons rather than allowing them to, or actually in this case photons, than allowing them to reflect back to the source of the transmission and the effects of a large weapons bay. So the J-20 has an internal weapons bay, so they've been familiar with that. But the aerodynamic effects and the challenges with releasing munitions from a weapons bay like that, is not to be... it is a continuing challenge even for those who know it very well. And that's why the Air Force has the SEEK EAGLE program down at Eglin Air Force Base to keep figuring out all the new permutations of how munitions interact with the air flow as they come out of the weapons bay. And all the little surprises that take place when that happens.

Guy Norris:

And let's not forget about the challenge of propulsion, which has always been the longest pole in the tent for any of the Chinese programs, whether you're talking commercial or military. It's traditionally been the hardest nut to crack, probably second only to stealth really in terms of sort of a package really.

Steve Trimble:

Yeah, they do have options, right? So reportedly what's understood is that they've re-engined H-6Ks from... what was it... the WP-8, which was on the H-6G'S that had been upgraded to the K. And WP-8 was based on the AM-3, the Mikulin AM-3, which is, I mean it's roughly equivalent to TF-33 or one of those early, not even turbofans but turbojet engines. But they were only upgraded with the WS-18, which is really the Chinese version of the Soloviev of D-30 KP2. So I mean that's bringing you up to 1960s, maybe 1970 standards. That's not modern engine technology. There are new turbofan engines being developed. There's the WS-20, which may borrow heavily from the core of the CJ-1000, the commercial core or the WS-15, the supersonic afterburning turbofan that is now entered flight testing and maybe even close to operational service if not already an operational service with the J-20A. So obviously with a bomber application, especially if it's flying wing, you wouldn't use the afterburner in that case. So there are options that are sort of on the shelf for them.

Guy Norris:

But does beg the question, doesn't it? At what are you looking at the evolution of the H-20? At what point in this trajectory of Chinese aerospace development does it begin? Because as you mentioned earlier, they're very good at not reinventing the wheel i.e. I mean, look at the hypersonic technology for example, that came really hard on the heels of most research that was done here in the US. Is it the same with this, do you think? In other words, do they take off from where the B-2 left off or do they jump in midstream somewhere when the B-21 was in design, for example? So is it a four-engined low bypass turbo engine powered, or is it a two engine twin engine B-21 type design with cunning combination of advanced commercial or advanced cores with re-fan, that sort of thing?

Steve Trimble:

This is the hardest thing to answer if you don't have a security clearance and if you're not inside the program, because I think these days, the majority of the kinds of things that really separate the most modern aircrafts, like say a B 21 and B-2 are not visible from the outside. It's all the stuff that goes on in the inside, subsystem development, the software, the way that the sensors are... the architecture of the sensors, the architecture of the software that runs those sensors and how they all work together, the networks that they feed into.

That is really the difference maker in say as we look at US technology going from B-2 to B-21. At this point, I mean, it's really hard to be able to assess that from the outside without a security clearance, maybe even with a security clearance, I don't know. But if you go in, those would be the differentiators, but that's the hardest stuff to do. That's the trickiest, most nuanced stuff that we literally spend tens of billions of dollars a year trying to figure out across all of the programs and still struggle with as we write about quite often just on the US side. And maybe they're having similar issues.

Guy Norris:

And Matt, from your perspective, looking at the missions that you outlined earlier on, or at least the requirements for those missions, would you imagine that they would be pursuing a long range capability with an adapted, say, higher bypass engine with a re-fanned technology and that kind of approach? Or do you think this is more old school really, where it's just bigger wing, lots of fuel capacity and an engine they can trust? Any idea or any thoughts from you on that?

Matt Jouppi:

Yeah, it's a really interesting point, and I think it's very difficult to answer authoritatively in the Chinese context. But just looking at the US for B-21, they set out to have really limited risk. They wanted to mature as many existing technologies that were already available to B-21, whether that was components of the engine, avionics and mature stealth technologies from the prior next generation bomber program, right? And I think that could make a lot of sense for China, especially given that the novelty that this is their first stealth bomber. But again, it's just really hard to say.

As far as what Steve was talking about, the systems' integration challenge, that really is kind of where the two plus two equals five kind of math is and where the US has a first mover advantage in that area. And the US is talking about a family of systems for long range strike as opposed to just the B-21. And it'll be interesting to see if the Chinese think along similar lines for H-20, how will that work in the broader force structure and concert with other assets? One of the technical challenges that they may have that the US experience from the B-2 program was the leading edge treatments for the aircraft, to give the aircraft to kind of counter VH stealth capability. Northrop had a lot of trouble developing that over a period of years. It'll be interesting to see the Chinese approaches to that.

Guy Norris:

Yeah, thanks Matt. I think one of the questions, and we really should just quickly go back to Steve there because I think one of the aspects of that question, my earlier question was range. So what do we know about the range or at least the projected capability of the H-20?

Steve Trimble:

So the Chinese military has not stated other than saying it's a long range bomber, that was General Xiaotian's statement at the Air Force Academy in China in September of 2016, which seemed to differentiate it between the medium range capability of the H-6 fleet. Especially even the re-engined fleet, which it has approximately 7,200 kilometer range. Of course range is less of a material measurement for a bomber or for any combat aircraft compared to like an airliner because the military aircraft in the course of a mission can't go to its maximum range, land, refuel and come back. Because presumably it's an enemy territory at that point or someplace that doesn't necessarily want to spend a lot of time in on the ground.

So its combat radius is the key determinant, which is half of the range, roughly speaking. And what we know about the range really just comes from the DOD assessments that they've submitted to Congress each year in the China military power report. And they've been doing that since 2016. And starting in 2019, those reports included a range figure of 8,500 kilometers. And that was considered significant because if you look at the layout of the Chinese bomber bases, that allows, say the closest base to Guam is Anqing the 28th air regiment, which has the H-6K's, these are the conventional H-6s, that there are 3,500 kilometers from Guam. So that places them in easy combat radius of Guam and beyond into the Western Pacific because presumably you wouldn't want to start at the second island chain, but you'd want to try to also target the forces that are coming into resupply or replenish those forces.

And then starting in, I think it was, let me look here. It was 2021, no, 2022, they changed that figure... no, sorry, it was 2023, they changed the figure from 8,500 kilometers to 10,000 kilometers. So the Pentagon's China military power report changed their estimate, increased it from 8,500 to 10,000 kilometers. And the interesting thing about that is that that puts RAAF, sorry, Royal Australian Air Force Base, Tindal, in Northwest Territories just south of Darwin within the combat radius of even the 106 Air Brigade, which operates the H-6Ns. These are the nuclear payload versions of the H-6 that are based in Neixiang. I apologize to all our Chinese speakers. I'm butchering how do to pronounce these, but I'm trying.

Guy Norris:

That's easy for you to say, Steve.

Steve Trimble:

Of course, these are all unrefueled distances. These are all unrefueled distances and presumably these aircraft will have refueling, although you have to mitigate that with the idea that if you have a stealth bomber and you have something like a Y-20 flying along with it, dragging it somewhere, you're kind of giving away that there's a stealth bomber. Even if you can't see it, you can see the tanker. So it's not like just because this bomber is refuelable, that means it can be refueled beyond a certain distance from Chinese defended airspace. But also on top of that, the H-6N is armed reportedly with DF-21D, the air launch ballistic missile with reportedly 1500 kilometer range. So it's not necessary for the H-6N to get all the way to RAAF Tindal.

They can just get within 2,500, or I guess in that case 3,500 kilometers or in case of Guam 2,500 kilometers. But the important thing to also remember about the H-20 and the Chinese military is they don't have those kinds of bases. They don't have those kinds of forward bases as options available to them in the context of a strike on the US. So obviously they have their ICBMs and even some of their IRBMs that can potentially reach US territory beyond Guam, but there's no place for them to stop and refuel or forward base as we have with Diego, Garcia, Tindal and Guam, as well as the entire first island chain, of course. So those are important differences as we talk and think about the range. And the range of course is very important when we talk about strategic bomb.

Guy Norris:

Well, I guess we're almost getting towards the end here, but I did want to make one couple of... well, one observation was for those who of us visited the Singapore Air Show and got to see the commercial Comac C919 airliner on display there. There's no doubting the increased sophistication and capability of China writ large in terms of aerospace, both on the propulsion and the airframe side and system side. So this is definitely something that's beginning to be within their wheelhouse, I think. But just one last question, Steve, for you, obviously aren't the Russians also doing something too in this area, the PAK DA, I think it's called, or correct me if I'm wrong with that. Yes.

Steve Trimble:

Yes, promising aviation complex for long range aviation. Yeah, that been a program that has been going on for several years, but went completely quiet in terms of the Russian media reports about it. Since the Ukraine invasion, the most recent, I would say Ukraine invasion began in February of 2022. There had just been not a lot of reporting about it except for one intriguing report that came out in January. It's called Gazeta, a business newspaper in Moscow, published a story in January talking about a new final assembly line opening in Kazan to support Tu-214, which is a Russian airliner that is roughly equivalent to like a 757.

And because of the sanctions and so forth, Russia has had to rely on their own domestic technology for equipping their airlines for the most part. I mean, they're still using Western aircraft in violation of the sanctions as well, but they are also trying to increase production significantly of their own domestic aircraft. And the interesting thing about that is Kazan had built a new factory on the site where they had previously built and are still re-manufacturing Tu-160s, their supersonic bomber to the M-2 standard, or the M-2M standard. And there was a new factory that started to be built, I think it was in 2018 or 2019, just alongside it as they were talking, as there were reports in the Russian media about PAK DA going from development into production.

And as they were reporting, as this newspaper was reporting about this new factory that had been repurposed to develop Tu-214s, it said that this factory had been built for another purpose, but had been diverted to support this new increase in Tu-214 production. So it made you think that they put PAK DA on the backseat, which obviously is probably not their biggest priority right now with Ukraine. Who knows exactly what the thinking is. But there was just some interesting reporting there that suggests that PAK DA may have been put on the back burner, both with dealing with different operational realities and priorities for the military fleet, as well as this need for additional capacity on their domestic commercial airline manufacturing.

Guy Norris:

Well, I guess really that's all the time we do have for this week's Check 6 Podcast. Special thanks obviously to our producer in London, Guy Ferneyhough, and to our listeners, thanks very much for your time. And join us again next week for another Check 6.