Pakistan has unveiled its PFX (Pakistan Fighter Experimental) program as a significant upgrade to its JF-17 joint program with China. The new upgrade will have a number of stealth features ranging from the use of radar-absorbing composite materials and diverterless supersonic inlets (DSI) to internal weapons bay (IWB) which will significantly reduce the aircraft's radar signature. It is targeted for completion by the end of this decade. In addition, the PFX's twin-engine design will improve maneuverability and allow greater payload capacity.
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Pakistan PFX Concept Fighter. Source: Raksha Anirveda |
The program is part of Pakistan's broader strategy to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers and strengthen the domestic defense industry. Currently, 58% of JF-17 components are manufactured locally by PAC, but Pakistan aims to increase this share to achieve full production autonomy for the PFX. It is not just about the PAF modernization but also about positioning Pakistan as an important player in the global military aviation market.
The PFX is an evolution of a plan that Pakistan announced in 2017 to develop and produce 5th generation fighter planes. It is part of Pakistan Air Force's highly ambitious Project Azm that includes building Kamra Aviation City dedicated to education, research and development and manufacturing of advanced fighter jets, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and weapon systems.
The PAF has already started replacing its aging fleet with the induction of the Chinese J10C fighter jets which are considered 4.5 Gen. The J10-C has stealth features like diverterless supersonic inlets (DSI). Its BVR capability is supported by PL-15 missiles, with an engagement range of up to 200 kilometers, facilitating long-range target engagements.
The PAF has also begun the process of acquiring 5th generation Chinese J35 fighter jets. The delivery of 40 J35 fighters to Pakistan is expected within two years, potentially altering regional dynamics, particularly concerning India.
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12 comments:
This is undeniably uplifting news after a long time, but by the time they develop this in a decade, who knows what advanced aircraft our adversaries will have developed by then.
Muzaffar: "..by the time they develop this in a decade, who knows what advanced aircraft our adversaries will have developed by then"
Pakistani is definitely ahead of India in delivering fighter aircraft in large numbers. Not only has PAF inducted 168 of JF-17 so far but Pakistan is also exporting it to at least 4 countries. On the other hand Indian Air Force is complaining he has not received 40 Tejas the IAF ordered back in 2010
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/iaf-chief-ap-singh-tejas-fighter-jets-production-delay-china-sixth-generation-aircraft-2661342-2025-01-08
Okay. So, Pakistan has bought 10 J-10C jets and is about to buy 40 J35 jets from China.l, even as it is negotiating purchase of KAAN fighters from Turkey, while simultaneously developing PFX with China.. All great. But what still baffles me is how is a country running on an IMF program with barely 10 billion USD in its forex kitty and struggling to allocate funds for its development needs finding the money for all this? Does Pakistan's military establishment have a secret hoard? I mean, India with its much bigger economy and with over 650 billion USD in forex reserves is stingy in comparison when it comes to spending money for its defense modernization needs. The 126 jet MMRCA program was abandoned ostensibly due to its 'high cost' and the Indian govt instead settled for 36 jets only. And this is when IAF has barely 28-30 squadrons of antiquated fighters when it needs 42 squadrons of modern fighter jets for a hypothetical two-front war with Pakistan and China.
But don't get me wrong. It is, of course, solely the prerogative of Pakistani government/establishment to spend its money as it wants. But if I were a Pakistani, I would be more worried about the strain all of these armament would be putting on Pakistan's weak finances than their utility in a hypothetical war with India. Moreover, Pakistan's more pressing security concern at the moment appear to be the unrelenting militant attacks in KP and Balochistan across its western and northern frontiers than any Indian attack from its eastern border.
That said, the news of Pakistan's aggressive push to modernize its air force could also turn out to be a blessing in disguise for India as it might jolt the Indian estblishment out of its slumber and double down on its long delayed defense modernization programs. Indian govt might now try to accelerate its AMCA program while trying to ramp up the squadron strength of IAF in the interim by purchasing more Rafales. There has also been reports of Indian govt in talks with Safran and Rolls Royce for acquiring the designs for a fighter jet engine that can be domestically built in India. This project might be accelerated as well. The usage of American GE F404/414 engines in the Tejas program has been one of its weak links. In fact, the recent delays in delivery of Tejas Mk1/1A jets by HAL was reportedly due to delays in the supply of GE engines from US, who might seek to use it as a geo-political leverage on India.
"Currently, 58% of JF-17 components are manufactured locally by PAC.."
If I'm not mistaken, this "58%" only refers to the airframe and does not include engines, avionics, radar, weapon systems etc.
"Fifty-eight percent of the JF-17 airframe, including its front fuselage, wings, and vertical stabilizer, is produced in Pakistan, whereas forty-two percent is produced in China, with the final assembly and serial production taking place in Pakistan."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAC/PAC_JF-17_Thunder
Also, I would expect JF-17 and PFX to be largely of Chinese design, with Pakistan's role being largely confined to manufacture of some of its components. By contrast, the Tejas/AMCA design is largely India's own and the composite airframe of Tejas is entirely built in India.
"As of 2016, the indigenous content in the Tejas Mark 1 is 59.7% by value and 75.5% by the number of line replaceable units. The indigenous content of the Tejas Mk 1A is expected to surpass 70% in the next four years."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_Tejas
Salam Sir
Thanks for the post , as far as I know and have heard Tejas is a locally made aircraft of IAF( Indian Airforce), why it has to order for its import or have to order it to recieve?
Thanks
Turkiye, Pakistan to establish joint factory for production of KAAN fighter jet – Middle East Monitor
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250122-turkiye-pakistan-to-establish-joint-factory-for-production-of-kaan-fighter-jet/
Turkiye and Pakistan are reportedly set to establish and operate a joint factory to produce the new Turkish KAAN fighter jet, in what would be a significant move between the two countries.
According to a number of Turkish and Pakistani news outlets, representatives from 32 institutions gathered at the 8th meeting of the Pak-Turkish Industrial Expo in Pakistan earlier this month and finalised plans for a partnership between Ankara and Islamabad for the production of Turkiye’s KAAN fighter jet.
At those talks, Turkish Defence Minister, Yasar Guler, reportedly confirmed that an agreement for Pakistan’s official participation in the KAAN jet project is almost reached, almost a year and half after the Minister initially revealed that the two countries would be cooperating in the aircraft’s development and production.
Pakistan’s participation, according to the reports, is set to come in the form of a factory jointly established and operated between the Turkish and Pakistani counterparts, intended to produce and manufacture the jet.
The fifth-generation aircraft, developed by Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), is intended to replace Turkiye’s dated fleet of F-16 fighter jets in an effort to boost the country’s defence capabilities and keep up with the advancement of other newly-developed jets, particularly after the US cut Ankara out of the F-35 fighter jet program back in 2019.
The reported plans for the joint factory mark a significant milestone in the rising defence and military cooperation between Turkiye and Pakistan, providing Ankara with the opportunity to increase the production of the KAAN jet a low cost and to expand its export, while giving Islamabad the ability to boost its own aerial defence capabilities and to advance engineering skills within its own domestic industries.
Aside from the question of how Pakistan would find the money for all this in the midst of an acute economic crisis (the country is essentially surviving on loans), I am also intrigued why Pakistan would seek to acquire two different jets of the same class and potentially very similar abilities. By the looks of it, both J35 and KAAN have similar weight (MTOW) and combat capabilities. Is Pakistan hedging its bets should the performance of J35 fall short of expectations, despite all the "fifth generation" hype? Are there concerns about its performance - and especially the reliability of its engine? India's lack of interest in Russia's supposedly fifth-generation stealth fighter Su-57 was due to questions about its build quality and engine reliability. The Chinese engine in the J35 is new and its long-term reliability is unknown at this point, while KAAN intends to use a GE engine in the initial lot, and a domestic engine developed with ToT from a Western firm eventually.
On the flip side though, KAAN had its first test flight only last year and it will be many years before it becomes combat-ready, unlike the J35.
Alibaba releases AI model it says surpasses DeepSeek | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/alibaba-releases-ai-model-it-claims-surpasses-deepseek-v3-2025-01-29/
BEIJING, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Chinese tech company Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition
"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B," Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models.
The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.
But DeepSeek's success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.
Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
This echoed DeepSeek's claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI's o1 on several performance benchmarks.
The predecessor of DeepSeek's V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.
The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens - or units of data processed by the AI model - led to Alibaba's cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models.
Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu (9888.HK), opens new tab, which released China's first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country's most valuable internet company Tencent (0700.HK)
Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup "did not care" about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.
OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities.
Liang said in his July interview that he believed China's largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek's lean operation and loose management style.
"Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants' capabilities have their limits," he said.
Pakistan Air Force to Gain “12-14 Year” Edge Over India with J-35A Fighter Acquisition
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/pakistan-air-force-to-gain-12-14-year-edge-over-india-with-j-35a-fighter-acquisition/#google_vignette
Retired Air Commodore Zia Ul Haque Shamshi, a former senior officer of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), asserts that the acquisition of the advanced J-35A will leave the Indian Air Force (IAF) lagging behind, giving Pakistan a technological upper hand for the next 12 to 14 years.
(DEFENCE SECURITY ASIA) –Pakistan’s bold move to secure up to 40 J-35A fifth-generation fighter jets from China is set to reshape the regional air power equation, granting its air force a formidable edge over its long-standing rival, India.
Retired Air Commodore Zia Ul Haque Shamshi, a former senior officer of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), asserts that the acquisition of the advanced J-35A will leave the Indian Air Force (IAF) lagging behind, giving Pakistan a technological upper hand for the next 12 to 14 years.
“India is not expected to acquire fifth-generation fighter jet capabilities within that timeframe, which will provide Pakistan with a strategic edge,” he stated.
Last year, the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) sent shockwaves through the region with strong indications of its intent to acquire the cutting-edge J-35A stealth fighter, a next-generation war machine developed by China’s Shenyang Aircraft Corporation.
Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu further fueled anticipation, declaring that the J-35A would soon take its place in the PAF’s arsenal, signaling a transformative leap in Pakistan’s aerial warfare capabilities.
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“Negotiations have been conducted for the acquisition of the J-35A, which will soon become part of the Pakistan Air Force,” he said during an event last year.
Recently, Pakistani media reported that the PAF has already sent a group of its pilots to China for training on the J-35A fighter jet, further reinforcing the country’s commitment to integrating fifth-generation fighter technology into its fleet.
The J-35A is China’s second stealth fighter after the J-20 “Mighty Dragon.”
While the J-20 remains exclusive to the Chinese Air Force, the J-35A has been developed with potential export customers in mind.
This latest acquisition will further expand the presence of Chinese-made fighter jets in Pakistan’s air force inventory, which already includes the J-10C and the jointly developed JF-17.
Reports that Pakistani pilots have begun training on the J-35A indicate that Islamabad is on a definitive path toward fielding fifth-generation fighter aircraft.
This move has raised concerns in neighboring India, which continues to rely on 4.5-generation fighters such as the Sukhoi Su-30MKI and Rafale jets.
India now faces the prospect of dealing with not just China—whose air force already operates the J-20—but also Pakistan, which appears set to introduce its own fifth-generation fighters.
According to analysts, Pakistan’s acquisition of the J-35A, as reported by its media, is likely intended to replace its aging fleet of American-made F-16s and French-built Mirage 5 aircraft.
If confirmed, this procurement could significantly alter the balance of air power in the region and pose a new strategic challenge for India.
The J-35A is expected to enhance Pakistan’s tactical flexibility, allowing its air force to conduct deeper penetration missions into enemy airspace.
China has been actively promoting the J-35A for export, even establishing a dedicated office to attract potential foreign buyers.
Unlike the J-20, which Beijing has restricted from export—similar to how the U.S. limits sales of the F-22 Raptor—the J-35A is being positioned as a viable alternative for international customers.
The J-35A stands as a formidable force in modern aerial warfare—a single-seat, twin-engine, medium-sized stealth fighter engineered for dominance.
Boasting cutting-edge low-observability technology and cost-effective operational efficiency, it is poised to challenge the world’s most advanced combat aircraft.
Pakistan Air Force to Gain “12-14 Year” Edge Over India with J-35A Fighter Acquisition
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/pakistan-air-force-to-gain-12-14-year-edge-over-india-with-j-35a-fighter-acquisition/#google_vignette
Reports indicate that China is gearing up for the J-35A’s integration into carrier-based operations, positioning it as a direct rival to the U.S. Navy’s F-35B and F-35C variants developed by Lockheed Martin.
Though its full technical specifications remain shrouded in secrecy, the aircraft’s Maximum Take-Off Weight (MTOW) has reportedly surged from 25,000 kg to 28,000 kg, hinting at increased firepower and endurance.
Powering this stealth marvel are WS-19 engines, each delivering a staggering 12 tons of thrust—an upgrade that solidifies its place as a next-generation powerhouse in the skies.
The fighter jet is equipped with two internal weapons bays, each capable of carrying two medium-range air-to-air missiles.
Additionally, it features external hardpoints for various bombs and missiles, enhancing its multirole combat capabilities.
Pakistan’s decision to procure the J-35A is poised to reshape the regional air power equation, compelling India to accelerate its own efforts to develop or acquire fifth-generation fighter jets.
Trump says US to increase military sales to India, eventually provide F-35 jets | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/markets/commodities/trump-says-india-agreed-purchase-more-us-oil-gas-2025-02-13/
US will raise military sales to India by many billions of dollars, Trump says
Trump’s F-35 offer still a proposal, Indian official says
F-35 purchase process has not started yet, Indian official says
Any talks on F-35 sales will be between governments, Lockheed Martin says
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) - The United States will increase military sales to India starting in 2025 and will eventually provide F-35 fighter jets, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday.
"We'll be increasing military sales to India by many billions of dollars. We're also paving the way to ultimately provide India with the F-35 stealth fighters," Trump told reporters.
Trump did not provide a timeline, but foreign military sales, especially for cutting-edge technology like the stealthy F-35 jet, typically take years to work through.
Pakistan and Türkiye Sign Agreements on EW and Other Projects - Quwa
https://quwa.org/pakistan-defence-industry/pakistan-and-turkiye-sign-agreements-on-ew-and-other-projects/
In terms of defence, the most notable agreements included an MoU for cooperating on air force-related electronic warfare (EW) as well as an MoU between Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAŞ) and Pakistan’s Naval Research and Development Institute (NRDI).
Overall, it is unclear how much deal-making progress – if any – the MoUs represent, but these two deals could be a reflection of several ongoing Pakistani defence programs.
MoU on Air Force EW Technology
Through its official calendar and unofficial publication – Second to None – the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) had confirmed it was seeking a new airborne stand-off range jamming (ASOJ) aircraft. The PAF also heavily implied that its recently acquired business jet, a single Bombardier Global Express 6000, would be the platform for this ASOJ aircraft.
It is possible that the recently signed MoU involved a commitment to either advance a deal centered on the Aselsan HAVASOJ suite, which could be integrated onto the PAF’s Global Express 6000, or to develop a bespoke solution.
Alternatively, the MoU could also speak to the PAF’s wider EW efforts, which involve a number of different homegrown programs. These programs include a communications EW (C-EW) for communications intelligence (COMINT) and multi-band jamming roles, GPS denial systems, passive electronic intelligence (ELINT) sensors, and many other systems for potential use by both the PAF and the Pakistan Army (PA).
While Pakistan is currently prioritizing domestic EW projects, the likes of the National Aerospace and Science Technology Park (NASTP), Defence Science and Technology Organization (DESTO), or National Radio and Telecommunication Corporation (NRTC) could be interested in drawing on Turkish technology inputs and expertise.
Interest in Turkish inputs would not conflict with Pakistan’s original EW project goals–it would be complementary. Pakistan lacks the industrial capacity to fully source each of the necessary inputs of its defence electronic programs, be it the EW projects or even the up and coming radar projects. Turkish vendors like Aselsan, Havelsan, Meteksan, and others could provide critical inputs, such as transmit/receive modules (TRMs), for example. Likewise, Turkish and Pakistani vendors could collaborate and jointly design and develop original solutions for the Pakistani military.
For example, instead of acquiring the Aselsan HAVASOJ, the PAF’s NASTP could tap Aselsan’s assistance to develop a custom ASOJ for the PAF. In this scenario, the PAF ASOJ would combine Pakistani-designed inputs with Turkish subsystems.
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