Footage Shows China’s Second Sixth Generation Fighter Continuing to Make Progress in Flight Testing

The sixth generation fighter under development by China’s Shenyang Aircraft Corporation has continued to make progress in flight testing, with growing quantities of footage showing the aircraft operating at both low and high altitudes. The fighter is broadly comparable in its dimensions to the country’s most capable fifth generation fighter type, the J-20, while a second sixth generation fighter type under development by the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation has much larger dimensions and appears intended for operations across much longer ranges. The two are the only tailless fighter types currently in flight testing anywhere in the world, with China’s defence sector having proven capable of producing fighters with very high levels of manoeuvrability using designs that heavily compensate for the lack of vertical tails. 

A primary advantage of Shenyang’s fighter is that its smaller size than that developed by Chengdu is expected to make production and sustainment considerable cheaper. This is critical to allowing fighters to be fielded widely, with major cost overruns with the U.S. F-35 and F-22 having been key to preventing them from widely replacing fourth generation fighters, while in China’s case the cost effectiveness of the fifth generation J-20 has allowed it to be procured on a very large scale. Shenyang’s fighter is expected to be able to provide a one-for-one replacement for older heavyweight fighter types, likely phasing aircraft such as the Su-30MKK and J-11B out of service in the 2030s. 

In 2025, Chinese researchers associated with the program published work concerning flight-control technology for a tailless flying-wing aircraft operating from an aircraft carrier. The significance is considerable because a tailless aircraft presents unusual challenges during carrier approaches: without conventional vertical stabilisers and rudders, flight-control software and distributed control surfaces must compensate for the loss of conventional aerodynamic control authority. The very high levels of manoeuvrability demonstrated by Chengdu’s fighter, however, indicate that designs have compensated for this. While Chengdu’s fighter may be too large for carrier operations, Shenyang’s sixth generation fighter may well be intended to serve in both the Navy and the Air Force. 

Satellite imagery in 2025 showed both the Chengdu and Shenyang next-generation fighters at a remote Chinese military test facility in Xinjiang. The Lop Nur facility has an exceptionally isolated location, an extremely long runway and a history associated with China’s nuclear weapons testing programme, making it particularly well suited to sensitive aerospace development. The facility has subsequently undergone substantial construction, with new hangars, taxiways and support infrastructure appearing in recent satellite imagery. Reports in September 2026 have linked the expansion to China’s next-generation fighter and bomber testing, although the exact relationship between individual construction projects and the sixth generation fighters remains unconfirmed.