Key Points and Summary – “White Emperor,” a supposed sixth-generation fighter mockup from China’s 2024 Zhuhai Air Show, is an unrealistic propaganda piece.
-It has glaring design flaws and a resemblance to Hollywood movie jets, noting that fundamental Chinese 6th-gen concepts look nothing like it.
Image Credit: X Screenshot of China’s White Emperor
-The key lesson is to leave aircraft analysis to experts who can distinguish viable engineering from disinformation.
The White Emperor NGAD 6th Generation Fighter Is Likely Just a Sham
WARSAW, POLAND – There is a fantastical world of bogus model aircraft that try and fail to envision the future of flight.
In 1986, Testors designed and built an “F-19 Stealth Fighter Concept” model kit. At that point in history, the Air Force’s real stealth fighter was like the abominable snowman: much talked about but never seen.
The real stealth fighter, we later learned, was designated F-117A. (No F-19 fighter was ever built.) When the aircraft’s real shape and details were revealed a year later, it unsurprisingly looked nothing like the model.
One year later, in 1987, Testors released a model of another fictitious aircraft – the Mikoyan MiG-37 Ferret-E “Soviet Stealth Fighter.”
It took more than another two decades for the post-Soviet Russian aerospace sector to actually produce a stealthy-looking fighter – emphasis on the word “looking” – and it was developed not by Mikoyan, but by the Sukhoi Design Bureau.
The Chinese went one better at the November 2024 Air Show China in Zhuhai.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the province is home to many factories that produce a great portion of the world’s toys.
The White Emperor ‘Fighter’
This 2024 show saw one of the biggest toys ever to masquerade as a real airplane design.
Dubbed “the White Emperor” and purporting to be a sixth-generation fighter, the mockup did manage to fool some observers who treated the aircraft as a realistic and practical design – which it clearly is not.
White Emperor Fighter from China. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The aircraft bears a passing resemblance to two full-sized mockups made for Hollywood films. The most recent partial look-alike is the F/A-37 Talon from the 2005 film Stealth, but the aircraft also looks a lot like what was called the “MiG-31” in 1982’s Firefox, starring Clint Eastwood.
(The real MiG-31, we would learn several years later, looked nothing like the aircraft portrayed in the film.)
Get Real
There is plenty to suggest the White Emperor is nothing near a real design. First, the aircraft would never have the level of radar cross-section reduction a modern fighter needs. The aircraft is supposed to be stealthy, but its forward and aft control surfaces would end up being major radar reflectors.
Meanwhile, the aircraft’s wings are far too small for an aircraft needing to cover the ranges this sort of platform would be required to fly.
One interpretation is that the designers are trying to use the center fuselage as part of the wing area – a clever design concept used by the team at Saab with the latest JAS-39E/F fighter.
But one esoteric configuration technique does not make a live aircraft. As an article written by a Polish defense website concedes, “of course, the entire mockup could be disinformation and propaganda. And the direction of Chinese technological development could be completely different, for example, aimed at stealing solutions developed for NGAD or GCAP.”
That assessment is almost completely correct. The two Chinese-design sixth-generation fighters that were revealed a month after the air show – Chengdu’s massive three-engine J-36 and Shenyang’s more conventionally sized fighter design, designated as J-50, J-XD, or J-XDS – look nothing like the White Emperor.
Aerospace Design Literacy
The White Emperor has attracted a lot of attention. But the aerospace-design community cannot take this kind of a make-believe aircraft seriously.
Sometimes the frenzy over fake aircraft can verge into the absurd. Years ago, a Russian designer who had worked at Mikoyan Design Bureau recounted the mad panic that ensued when the “MiG-37 Ferret-E” model kit was released.
“Security people are some of the stupidest personnel that exist inside of any defense enterprise – particularly in Russia,” he recalled. “The thought that this model kit was a design made up out of whole cloth, looked nothing like anything that MiG would have developed and had an internal weapons bay that would not hold nearly enough munitions for its mission never entered their minds.”
“Nevertheless, all of us at the design bureau’s advanced design department were required to pour through miles of designs – almost all of them only on paper or subscale models – to prove whether or not such a design or anything that even remotely resembled it had ever been developed at Mikoyan. Of course there weren’t any – it was a waste of time, but it made the KGB officers assigned to the bureau look oh-so clever.”
Leave it to the Experts
The Russians have no monopoly on this kind of silliness.
Tom Clancy once recalled how he was interrogated by the FBI about how he could have gained access to classified data.
Meanwhile, members of Congress angrily questioned the CIA about why they had never received a briefing on the magnetohydrodynamic “caterpillar” drive.
This was the near-silent propulsion system that powered the Soviet submarine in “The Hunt for Red October.”
“I made it all up,” Clancy later said. But people who should have known better did not realize that – including U.S. Congressional leaders and federal agents. When it comes to declaring what is and is not a real fighter aircraft design, leave it to people who actually have some experience in this business.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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