Chinese military aircraft designers have proposed a new airborne early-warning radar that would fit inside an aircraft’s wing rather than a conventional nose-mounted radome or large radar dome above the fuselage.
The concept uses changes in flight attitude and coordination between multiple unmanned aircraft to expand surveillance coverage, potentially giving smaller platforms some of the capabilities traditionally associated with dedicated early-warning aircraft.
The design was outlined in a study published in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Measurement & Control Technology. Its authors include Ren Yunsong and researchers affiliated with the AVIC Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute, which developed China’s J-20 stealth fighter and designed the two-seat J-20S variant intended to operate alongside unmanned aircraft.
A radar array built into the wing
Conventional fighter aircraft typically house their primary radar in the nose, behind a protective radome. Meanwhile, airborne early-warning aircraft often use large radar arrays mounted above the fuselage to provide surveillance over a broad area. Both approaches have limitations: fighter noses restrict the size of the antenna, while large radar structures add weight, drag and complexity.
The Chinese team proposes embedding the radar antenna, control components and associated equipment inside the aircraft’s wing. The antenna’s radiating surface would face downward, with a protective cover following the wing’s external contours. This arrangement could provide a larger antenna aperture without requiring a prominent external radar dome, the South China Morning Postreported.
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The main challenge is that wings offer considerable surface area but have relatively thin cross-sections, limiting the volume available for radar hardware. The design therefore seeks to use the wing’s surface more efficiently while relying on aircraft manoeuvres to steer the radar’s coverage.
In one proposed operating mode, an unmanned aircraft would roll more than 45 degrees, tilting the wing-mounted antenna toward the side of the aircraft. By changing its flight attitude, the platform could redirect the radar beam toward different sectors without depending entirely on a mechanically rotating antenna.
Multiple aircraft could work as a distributed radar network
The proposal is based on distributed air combat, a concept explored by DARPA in 2014. Rather than depending on a single, expensive aircraft to provide broad-area surveillance, distributed operations would use multiple smaller platforms to share detection and tracking responsibilities.
The researchers describe four operating modes for the wing-mounted radar, covering all-direction and multi-direction detection, wide-area surveillance, concentrated searches for specific targets and coordinated operations designed to counter electronic interference. Several aircraft could divide surveillance tasks or combine their efforts to improve coverage in a particular sector.
This approach could help address a central challenge in airborne early warning, which is providing extensive detection coverage without relying on a small number of large, expensive platforms. Conventional early-warning aircraft have space for substantial radar arrays and powerful onboard systems, but their size and cost can limit how many can be deployed. Thus, smaller unmanned aircraft could potentially offer greater flexibility if they can achieve sufficient detection performance and coordinate reliably.
The concept could eventually be considered for future Chinese combat aircraft, including the J-20 and next-gen designs commonly referred to as the J-36 and J-50. However, the paper does not identify any of these aircraft as a confirmed platform for the technology, nor does it disclose a development schedule or flight-test results.
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ByBojan Stojkovski
Bojan Stojkovski is a freelance journalist based in Skopje, North Macedonia, covering foreign policy and technology for more than a decade. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, ZDNet, and Nature.
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