That's not too high actually. J-10C already cost approximately $50 million USD per unit.
As planes get more advanced, labor cost become less relevant to component cost. China is not going to produce a plane at 1/3 the price of American planes given similar performance.
That's a catch 22 situation. Because China also can't produce a jet that's 1:1 match price wise with the US / EU. Because then the buyer will go direct to the US and EU simply due to their solid reputation of building top notch jets and many of the platforms are combat proven, while the Chinese platforms are paper-proven as they've not seen combat yet. Combat proven is a HUGE capability by itself.
I watched several clips on Youtube, the J-20 moves seemed to be held back by the pilots. And I think they were told not to show too much to the public due to security reason maybe. Generally speaking, the performance was quite stunning.
It's actually not hard to understand it's flight characteristics as the airframe gives it up. Additionally, the Chinese gave up frontal stealth capability for canards. If I was designing it, I'd have kept the canards away to achieve further reduction in frontal RCS and would've instead planned on TVC for agility, similar to the F-22.
Finally officially confirmed!!
A J-20 fitted with WS-15 has already taken its maiden flight. Apparently the speaker in that video is a famous academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He is allegedly specialized in turbofan engines.
Video by @星辰大海SLC on Bilibili.
Congrats! Deino - Will you be able to point me to specs for WS-15 please? I'm interested to compare it with other Chinese engines and see it's performance.
