New imagery reveals additional details of China's tailless aircraft

China's Shenyang J-XD and Chengdu J-36 tailless combat aircraft have been observed conducting flight tests since December 2024. (Janes)

New imagery of China's Shenyang J-XD and Chengdu J-36 tailless stealth aircraft have emerged, showing their design features in greater detail.

That the two aircraft were involved in flight-testing was first revealed in December 2024, following the emergence of video footage of the trials on Chinese social media. Since then the J-36 (a tentative designation) appears to have conducted additional flight tests. However, the J-XD was not publicly seen in the air again, until three new photographs of the aircraft and a video surfaced on Chinese social media in April.

One of the photographs shows the lower port side view of the aircraft, revealing the aircraft's landing gear and showing its engine intakes and lambda-shaped wing in greater detail as well. Also visible is the aircraft's control surfaces, including its actuated, droop-down adaptive wingtips.

This was the first known reappearance of the J-XD in the air since the type was spotted conducting a test flight over Shenyang city on 22 December 2024.

A second photograph of the aircraft shows that, unusually, only the adaptive wingtip on the starboard wing was lowered as the J-XD flew at low altitude along a glide path towards a runway. This indicates that the wingtips can be lowered independent of each other. The wingtips are likely an additional control surface to improve manoeuvrability at low speeds, Janes assesses.

The aircraft also appears to have lengthy differential leading-edge extensions (LEXs). The angle of the aircraft in the photographs, however, hinders Janes from assessing if the aircraft has upper surface spoilers or pitch, and yaw thrust vectoring controls.