At 11:47 am on October 29, 2019, China Aviation Industry Corporation’s No. 2 FTC-2000G multi-purpose aircraft (also known as Guizhou JL-9) made its first flight, after the No. 1 aircraft flied from Guizhou Anshun Airport on September 28, 2018, marking another significant advance for the FTC-2000G project.
The manufacturer’s orientation for FTC-2000G aircraft is that it’s a multi-purpose jet developed by China Aviation Industry Corporation’s Guizhou Branch with independent innovation and intellectual property rights. And it’s positioned as: attack-based, air combat and coaching functions as auxiliary, with excellent performance, being autonomous, practical, cost-effective. The aircraft platform has strong function expansion capability, and has night vision night warfare function. By installing related mission equipment or pods, it can perform reconnaissance and electronic warfare tasks to meet different user needs.
FTC-2000G is regarded very similar to JF-17 and it’s rumored using some of JF-17’s technology, but with a price estimated only half of the latter.
The reason why JF-17 fighter is selling well is that it’s customized for the customer’s needs instead of pursuing high-end performance, and FTC-2000G from Guizhou Aircraft Company is similar, which is designed based on customer needs. So it needs to be a light multi-purpose attack aircraft, and the aircraft nose is equipped with fire control radar. The fuselage wing can be loaded with a variety of air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons, and the aircraft has adopted a special approach, designed as a two-seat trainer mode, compatible with supersonic coach flight and ground attack, as well as air combat in case of emergency, the biggest advantage of this design is to save money, so that the customers wouldn’t have to spend money to buy two kinds of aircrafts.
In addition to the many features of this aircraft, it’s ultra-cheap. Although FTC-2000G adopts side wings and air intake design of third-generation or even fourth-generation fighter jet, the aircraft still uses traditional mechanical manipulation, omitting expensive telex control system, generally 3 sets of domestic telex systems would be installed, each of 10 million yuan. And mechanical manipulation is adopted to save a lot of money for customers.
The only compromise is high-end aircraft mobility; however, as customers do not count on this aircraft for air combats, it is still very cost-effective.