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China’s Giant New Warplane Will Look Awfully Familiar to the U.S. Air Force
In what has become an almost annual Christmas tradition, the Chinese military has released the first blurry photos of a brand-new warplane prototype — in this case, Beijing’s first home-built heavy transport. It closely resembles other aircraft in its class including, most notably, the U.S. Air Force’s workhorse C-17. (www.wired.com) More...
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Imagine that, a cargo plane that looks like another cargo plane. Amazing!
Originality... Leave it to the Chinese and Russians. Look at the B29 a number of years ago at the France air show.
There are "rules" that need to be followed when designing military cargo planes: 1) Keep the fuselage as close to the ground as possible 2) Since the fuselage sits so low, you need the wings up high, hence high wings 3) Since the wings sit high, you need T-tail configuration to avoid the risk of having unstable air for the tail surfaces 4) Of course it being a cargo plane, and heavy, it needs power to get off the ground, so you get 4 engines.
Keeping to these rules, you get very similar looking aircraft and originality goes out the window.
Keeping to these rules, you get very similar looking aircraft and originality goes out the window.
People don't realize those basics...
True, it's always the simple things that get over looked.
I'd hardly call a transport a "warplane"
