As we have reported in 2018, Fake Chinese J-20 Stealth Fighter Jet Allegedly Spotted At U.S. Base.
Now Satellite imagery spots J-20 Mock-Up at Marine Corps Auxiliary Landing Field Bogue, or “Bogue Field”, an airfield that serves as a Marine Corps’ East Coast site for Field Carrier Landing Practice (FCLP) and carrier qualification.
A J-20 replica can be clearly seen parked on the left border of the northern apron of Bogue Field.
The airfield is periodically visited by MCAS Cherry Point’s AV-8B+ Harrier jump jets as well as teams of the F-35 Patuxent River Integrated Test Force teams conducting tests with the F-35B STOVL (Short Take-Off Vertical Landing) variant of the Lightning II stealth jet that can carry out vertical landing maneuvers in simulated expeditionary conditions on the airfield.
The photo dates back to March 12, 2019, so it was taken after the mock up was spotted in Georgia.
We don’t know what kind of visual or sensor training it is supposed to support over there: it may be some kind of night/day attack jet or helicopter pod usage or long-range targeting in a simulated attack on an enemy airfield. Who knows?
Needless to say, despite being realistic, the full-scale mock up also embeds some inaccuracies, which become pretty evident from close distance.
Andreas Rupprecht, an expert on Chinese military aviation, responding to our questions about the replica J-20 back in 2018, was the first to observe that the aircraft’s control surfaces had not moved while parked in a static position.
He also noted that the exhaust nozzles looked inaccurate and the landing gear was different from a real Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon, a two-engine fifth-generation stealth aircraft developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
The Chengdu J-20 also known as Mighty Dragon is a single-seat, twinjet, all-weather, stealth, fifth-generation fighter aircraft developed by China’s Chengdu Aerospace Corporation for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).[ The J-20 is designed as an air superiority fighter with precision strike capability; it descends from the J-XX program of the 1990s.
