In a report on “China Aviation Newspaper” on Feb. 22, the successful development of an advanced aircraft engine was unveiled, and general designer of the engine Liu Yongquan was praised.
Some military analyst thinks that according to time nodes of this reported engine, it should be the improved version of Type FWS-10B “Taihang” Engine, which is a high thrust engine.
The report doesn’t mention the specific type of this engine, but said that test pilot commented that the engine performs better than foreign similar products.
However, it has been reported for many times that Taihang Engine (WS-10 Series) has made great breakthroughs, but such reports were always followed by news about China’s importing more AL31FN engines from Russia for J-10 and J-11 fighters.
And other reports said the homemade aircraft engines of China are still not as reliable as Russian ones, so China has to adopt Russian engines for production of various fighters. For example, a widely spread domestic report in August said that the Taihang engine for J-10B was facing very high failure rate, and therefore hindered approval of this type of fighter.