On the morning of February 21, local time, Turkish Khan fighter jets soared into the sky. Turkey has become the fourth country after China, the United States and Russia to develop a stealth fighter. It is true that the Khan's design is relatively mediocre, but the Khan is a serious stealth fighter, not a half-fighter like the KF-21, and it is not an AMCA-like PPT!
Khan's first flight was a milestone in the development of Turkey's aviation industry. Turkey, which is ambitious, also wants to develop a carrier-based Khan for domestic aircraft carriers.
The Great Khan of Turkey, the spiral **, is decently designed, but Turkey has its own five generations.
The first flight of the Khan fighter lasted 13 minutes, the maximum flight altitude was 2400 meters, and the maximum flight speed was 230 knots. During the first flight, the landing gear was not flown for the first time. The first flight was accompanied by a two-seater F-16D fighter jet, piloted by the Khan's test pilot, Barbaros Demirba
When the new aircraft made its first flight, an airspeed tube was installed at the radar position, and it was a routine operation to land after flying for a few minutes without retracting the landing gear, and the Khan fighter was no exception. But Khan, who finally made his first flight, also has several points worth paying attention to.
First of all, the Khan fighter uses a unique double EOTS design. Diamond-shaped EOTS often appear under the nose of stealth fighters, while there is an EOTS window under and below the nose of the Khan fighter, a design that is only used by Turkey at this stage, and it has to be said that it is quite unique.
The design of the dual EOTS helps to enhance the situational awareness of the fighter in a silent state, but Turkey's technical level is insufficient, and the EOTS of the Red Apple UAV is to fool around with the camera, and the Khan fighter may use two IRST to make up for it first. It is worth complaining that the Khan prototype, which has just made its first flight, is not even equipped with IRST. Given that lack of prototype subsystems is the norm, this is not a problem.
Secondly, the cockpit design of the Khan fighter shows that the Khan fighter is not an air superiority fighter. The cockpit of the Khan fighter is high and convex and has a good view from the side. Erdogan in the cockpit of the Khan's fighter can see not only the shoulder, but even the elbow.
The cockpit protrusion of conventional air superiority fighters is quite small. Both the F-22 and Su-57 are just above the shoulder, and the F-35 protrudes slightly more, but it is not as exaggerated as the Khan fighter. What's more, the cockpit of the Khan fighter is more protruding than that of the F-16.
A large protruding cockpit obviously disrupts the aerodynamic shape of the fighter and affects the fighter's high-speed performance. The promotional image shows that the maximum speed of the Khan fighter is only 1Mach 8. Just slightly above the F-35, it is the slowest wave among heavy fighters.
The engine of Khan Zhan is the same as the two F-15s, the F110-GE-129 with a thrust of 13 tons, and the total power is close to 26 tons. And the related propaganda said that the maximum take-off weight of the Khan was 27215 tons, much lower than the 22 tons of the F-38, the 57 tons of the Su-35, and even less than the 35 tons of the F-31A75 tons, as well as 31 tons for the J-28.
The Khan's size is not small at all, but the maximum take-off weight is seriously low, and the thrust-to-weight ratio is close to one to one when the maximum take-off weight takes off, which is obviously unusual. Maybe it's because Turkey knows very well that it will almost impossible to get an engine with performance comparable to that of the F-119, so Turkey simply messes up? Let's start with a half-hanger that is a little slower and less maneuverable, but can be used to make a living. After having an engine with sufficient performance, how about a complete body with a maximum take-off weight of more than 30 tons?
For latecomers, phased R&D is in line with the needs.
Again, the rear of the cockpit of the Khan fighter is badly occluded, and the rear view is poor. The eye is always the most intuitive way of human perception, so even with the assistance of radar and optoelectronic systems, the pilot can observe the surroundings through the aircraft, and the air superiority fighter will choose to sacrifice aerodynamic efficiency to ensure the pilot's vision as much as possible.
And the cockpit design of the Khan fighter is quite similar to the F-35 family, as well as the J-35. The rear view of the Khan fighter with a high back is almost none. The problem is that the J-35 is a carrier-based aircraft, and the Chinese Navy values the lower viewing angle and the endurance of the fighter, so the J-35 has a big neck. The F-35 fighter family has a big neck in order to be compatible with the B type of vertical take-off and landing. What about the Khan?
Poor visibility and a convex cockpit make the Khan fighter look like an air superiority fighter. But the dual-EOTS design also shows that the Khan fighter has a strong focus on air combat capabilities, which is really a bit contradictory. However, considering the lack of accumulation in the Turkish aviation industry, it may not be able to meet the needs of the design of highly maneuverable fighters. At this stage, the positioning is closer to the Su-34 of the era of stealth fighters? The radar is good, the maneuverability is average. Air superiority later?
Large neck, large spacing of double hair, double hanging tail.
From the second, the overall design of the Khan fighter is modest. The Khan air intake is similar to the Garrett air intake of the F-22, but the Khan fighter does not use a narrow-pitch twin-engine design like the F-22 and J-20, but uses a wide-pitch twin-engine design like the Su-57. The high cockpit gives the Khan fighter a bit of the long neck of the Su-27 family. Large edge strips are designed from both sides of the fuselage to help improve aerodynamics.
Overall, the general layout was used instead of a high-performance layout, but for Turkey, which lacks experience in designing high-performance layouts, the conventional layout is the only option. But how does the Khan fighter layout look like the nose and air intakes of the F-22 + the side strip wing and rear of the cockpit of the J-35 + the rear half of the Su-57. Good guys, directly Chinese, American and Russian mixed blood, right?
Then, the Khan fighter adopted a unique transverse design of three main bomb bays + 2 side bomb bays. The Khan is more powerful than the J-20 prototype, and the side bomb bays are naturally indispensable. The Khan fighter and J-20, like the F-22, had a side bomb bay on each side of the air intake.
Barely visible seams in the side bomb bays.
The J-20 and F-22, F-35, X-32, and J-21 35 adopt a transverse dual main bomb bay design. The skeletal Su-57 fighter uses a tandem dual main bomb bay design. The Khan fighter, on the other hand, adopted a transverse three-main bomb bay design.
It looks like three, and there is one in the middle.
Considering that the J-20 has derived a basket of variants, the Thunderbolt-15 with folding wings is not used. Turkey, which is technologically weak, will only find it more difficult to solve this problem. At this stage, the Khan fighter is probably only available in the regular version of the AIM-120. It's just that Turkey's strategic value is very high, so Turkey has the possibility of purchasing AIM-120D or K-77M, and it is also a question whether the Khan fighter can stuff three foreign missiles into the same bomb bay.
However, with the three-bay design, even if Turkey does not have a medium-range air-to-air missile with foldable wings at this stage, it can still have the same air-to-air missile capacity as the F-22 by virtue of the numerical advantage of the main bomb bay. After Turkey develops the folding bomb, Khan will become the world's most bomb-loaded fifth-generation aircraft.
What is even more frightening is that the Khan fighter engines are very far apart, and if Turkey wants to, it may be able to dig out another main bomb bay to carry 12 medium-range air-to-air bombs at the same time, or six medium-range air-to-air bombs plus an additional 2,000 pounds. Transformed into a fighter-bomber comparable to the B-21.
Later, the design of the action barrel of the Khan fighter is also quite distinctive. In most cases, the outer tube is similar in size to the inner tube or slightly smaller, and the outer tube is slightly inward.
However, the size of the outer action tube of the Khan fighter is significantly larger than that of the inner action tube, and the outer action tube is a large inner eight, and what is even more incomprehensible is that the material of the front half of the inner and outer action cylinders of the Khan is different, and there is an obvious seam between the outer action tube and the fuselage. This design is a bit confusing.
Finally, the stealth trim of the Khan fighter is also quite in place。All of Khan's openings have a serrated design. Much more in place than the Su-57. I don't know if Russia feels ashamed. As for the lack of a monolithic canopy and the lack of a sharp vertical tail, it is not a problem. The Su-57 also does not have an integral canopy, and there is no room for later adjustments, and the Khan fighter can at least be adjusted after technology allows, which is stronger than that of Russia. As for the vertical tail cutting, the technical prototype of the J-20 does not have a cutting, and it can be cut later.
It's just that the vertical tail design of the Khan fighter is really skeletal surprise, and I really can't understand why the vertical tail is plugged into the engine, instead of plugging it into both sides of the engine? That's what Turkey did, and no other country designed it that way.
In addition, the landing gear design is also quite confusing. Normally, in order to enhance the stability of the fighter during landing, the landing gear will be set on both sides of the fuselage. The pursuit of stealth fighters is especially true in order to make room for the bomb bay as much as possible.
Turkey, which did not take the usual path, set the main landing gear under the fuselage. The design took up a lot of airframe space, perhaps because the Khan fighter's magazine space was too large to figure out. This kind of design really has no advantages at all, what is the Turkish map?
All in all, maybe the Khan fighter has such and such a problem, but for Turkey, the Khan is already quite good. It would be unacceptable if these problems appeared in China, the United States and Russia, but only these problems appeared in Turkey, which can be regarded as the level of the Turkish aviation industry and the European and American aviation people working in Turkey. There are too many demands on Turkey, and they are a bit out of place.
Turkey is not China, the United States and Russia! Turkey does not have a highly autonomous aviation industry. When Turkey develops fighter jets, it can only rely on mature subsystems in the international arms sales market, and then try to put together a shell that can be used flexibly. Therefore, it is inevitable that there will be various problems with the Turkish fifth-generation aircraft.
They are also engaged in integration, and the stealth version of the F A-18 engaged in by South Korea is not as good as the stealth version of the F-15 in Turkey
It is true that when Turkey developed Khan, it received technical support from Europe and the United States, and the engines were all original from the United States. But don't South Korea and India have international technical support? It is also an international subsystem integration, South Korea can only integrate KF-21, a half-hanger, and India's AMCA has always been just a PPT. And Khan is a veritable stealth machine.
The Khan who made the first flight and the prototype that was exhibited that year can be said to be irrelevant, irrelevant to each other.
What's more, although Turkey has received technical support from the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Sweden and other countries, but Britain, France and Sweden have not received technical support from the United States? Britain, France and Sweden did not come up with their own stealth fighters, while Turkey did. Even if the Khan fighter is really only the Su-34 of the new era, for Turkey, it is already very good. Anyway, the air combat effectiveness of fighter-bombers in the era of stealth fighters is not as good as the first, and they can calmly suppress non-stealth aircraft.
It is said that the Chinese khan and the Turkish khan are the same thing, Turkey has said that it is Turkic, or give the Turkish khan fighter a local translation on the whole? For example, names such as Khan, Great Khan, Plough Gutu, Turkish Khan, Turkish Shan Yu, etc.? Project Sword