However, what we hadn’t noticed at first glance is that the inside of the weapons bay was blurred so as to hide its content.
Hence, the roundels you can see are not painted on the bay ceiling but were added in post-production: a bad Photoshop work, as you can clearly see the warhead of the missile housed in the weapons bay.
So, did Beijing want to show the weapons bay giving just a hint to the missile China’s 5th generation fighter plane will carry or was the missile head just a mistake?
David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.
I took the following picture few years ago while flying a so-called SMI (Slow Mover Interception) exercise from Trapani airbase, in Sicily, Italy. On board a slow moving Siai 208 single engine light plane, whose […]
The six Y-20 cargo aircraft landed in Belgrade to deliver FK-3 surface-to-air missiles as the Serbian military continues to rearm. During the night between April 8 and 9, 2022, six People’s Liberation Army Air Force […]
According to the Japanese Ministry of Self-Defense, the Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) has scrambled its jets 138 times throughout the last quarter of 2013. All that happened due to the alleged provocative behaviour […]