On September 18, 2025, at the Changchun Air Show, a demonstration video circulating on the Chinese Air Force's booth amazed the audience: a twin-seat J-20S stealth fighter acted as a data link relay. When the single-seat J-20A and multiple stealth drones operated in formation, the scene was nothing short of impressive! They resembled a well-trained group of hunters, capable of accurately locking onto and "hunting" enemy airborne early warning aircraft and fighter squadrons.
This is not just a technological display, but also a revolutionary preview of modern air combat rules — the era of manned-unmanned collaborative operations has arrived. As the world's first twin-seat fifth-generation stealth fighter, the J-20S will firmly establish China's asymmetric advantage in complex airspace, marking a critical watershed in the technological gap between the Chinese and U.S. air forces.
In traditional air combat, airborne early warning aircraft serve as "airborne command centers," often needing to advance into the battlefield to provide real-time intelligence, yet facing the deadly risk of being shot down by enemy fighters or long-range missiles. The emergence of the J-20S has completely changed this past operational challenge. By combining the J-20S, J-20A, and stealth drones into a fully stealth formation, the Chinese Air Force has successfully created an operational system akin to "invisible ghosts."
In the video showing the combat situation, the stealth drones led the way, collecting electromagnetic signals emitted by the enemy while carefully scouting the positions of enemy aircraft, then transmitting this collected information to the J-20S immediately. At this point, the pilot in the rear seat of the J-20S comes into play, precisely controlling the drone to skillfully avoid the enemy's air defense missile network, ensuring that the entire combat formation remains undetected and maintains a stealthy state.
Once the location of the enemy airborne early warning aircraft is locked, the J-20S quickly transmits the information to our own airborne early warning aircraft and accompanying planes. The single-seat J-20A immediately launches long-range air-to-air missiles, achieving the ability to detect and attack before the enemy. The enemy's airborne early warning aircraft and the fighter escorts protecting it were brought down without even seeing our shadow.
This strategy gives the Chinese Air Force a significant advantage when facing U.S. F-35 or F-22 fighter groups. A dominant advantage: the fully stealth formation can approach silently, disrupting the enemy's information chain without exposing the position of our own airborne early warning aircraft. In contrast, the U.S. Air Force lacks a similar twin-seat stealth platform; its E-3 or E-7 airborne early warning aircraft still need to operate at high risk, making them easy prey for the J-20S.
The design of the J-20S is far more than just adding an extra seat to the aircraft. In fact, the pilot in the rear seat plays a crucial role, acting as the "tactical brain" of the entire operation. He is responsible for directing how the drone swarm flies and fights, managing electronic warfare, and integrating battlefield information to make the operation more efficient and targeted. This solves the problem of single-seat fighter pilots being overwhelmed and stressed during multi-task air combat: the front seat pilot focuses on flying the plane, while the rear seat pilot specializes in making decisions, thereby improving overall efficiency through division of labor.
In the manned-unmanned collaborative mode, the rear seat of the J-20S can remotely control "loyal wingmen" and unmanned fighters, executing complex tasks from reconnaissance, deception, to saturation attacks. In the demonstration, the J-20S not only relayed data but also dynamically adjusted the drone's path to avoid enemy fire coverage.
This fine control has elevated China's drones from simple "assistants" to platforms capable of carrying weapons externally, or small combat aircraft. At times, these drones can even act independently to compete for air superiority over a certain area. In the future, the Chinese Air Force can deploy drones via the J-20S to carry out high-end missions such as penetrating enemy electronic suppression or multi-domain coordinated strikes, far surpassing the U.S. "consumption" concept.
Although the U.S. Air Force is vigorously developing "loyal wingmen" (such as the XQ-58A), due to the lack of a twin-seat stealth fighter, these drones are mostly positioned as high-risk decoy platforms, easily sacrificed to ensure the survival of manned aircraft. The essential difference with the J-20S lies in: the Chinese model emphasizes the recoverability and multi-role flexibility of drones, achieving a dual leap in operational effectiveness and survivability.
This "extreme weakness" of the U.S. in high-end war environments will amplify its disadvantages in complex airspace — single-seat pilots struggle to balance flying and commanding, and drone swarms react too slowly to keep up with the J-20S's "efficient like a brain-controlled" advantages. The differing ideas between China and the U.S. on how to use drones in warfare make the strategic importance of the J-20S even more apparent.
The U.S. tends to view drones as "disposable munitions," hanging missiles to act as "shadows" of fighter jets, emphasizing quantity saturation; China, however, sees drones as "extended limbs" of a system. The J-20S can cooperate with manned fighters to fight, or perform missions independently, creating a new style of "manned aircraft plus unmanned aircraft" combat.
In this new style, the J-20S acts as a "leading commander," elevating this combat style to a very high level: it doesn't simply combine the capabilities of manned and unmanned aircraft, but creates a greater effect — the survival probability of the entire stealth aircraft formation is significantly increased, and the accuracy of attacking targets is improved several times over.
If manned-unmanned collaboration becomes the "new paradigm" of future air combat, the J-20S is undoubtedly the key determining factor in the gap between the Chinese and U.S. air forces. It not only reshapes the rules of air combat for the Chinese Air Force but also provides a blueprint for global air forces: at the Changchun Air Show, we have already caught a glimpse of the beginning of this transformation — just as the J-20S can direct drones to attack airborne early warning aircraft, this shows that the era of fighting together with manned and unmanned aircraft has truly arrived.
The Chinese Air Force is securing a dominant position in the skies through advanced technology.
Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7552146909100573247/
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