On October 14, 2026, the Chinese Navy said a task group led by the carrier Liaoning had sailed into the western Pacific for routine training under its annual plan, which it said was not directed at any specific country. Japan’s Joint Staff first spotted the group on October 13 southwest of the Danjo Islands, and it passed between Okinawa and Miyako Island the next day. According to Stars and Stripes, the Liaoning launched and recovered an unspecified number of aircraft about 155 miles south of Ishigaki Island, within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, and Japan scrambled fighters and sent the destroyer Yugiri, a P-1 and a P-3C to monitor. USNI News reports that the group then headed toward the South China Sea, and the timing falls days before a major U.S.-Japan exercise.
The group is a substantial one. USNI lists the Liaoning with two Type 055 large destroyers, Anshan and Wuxi, and a further destroyer, Huainen. Military Watch also says a Type 075 helicopter carrier is part of the formation, but Japan’s reports on the group do not mention one, so I could not confirm that. The deployment follows more than 40 days of exercises in June, which Beijing accused Japan of harassing, an accusation Japan’s Joint Staff rejected. It also follows an incident last December in which Liaoning J-15 fighters locked their radar on Japanese F-15s twice southeast of Okinawa. Military Watch says that incident showed the “vast superiority” of the Chinese aircraft, but nothing in the reporting supports that. A radar lock is a risky act, not a measure of capability, and the Japan Times notes Tokyo says it will keep monitoring professionally.
The J-35 story is where the sourcing is thinnest. Military Watch says new footage shows J-35 stealth fighters integrated into the Liaoning’s air wing for the first time. That would matter, because the Liaoning and Shandong use ski-jump decks rather than the catapults on the Fujian, and the J-35 was designed for catapult launch. State media tested the aircraft aboard the Liaoning in 2024 and discussed ski-jump operations in May, so the idea is plausible. But I could only find the claim in Military Watch’s own report, there is no official PLA Navy statement, and an aircraft appearing in footage is not the same as an operational air wing. If it is confirmed, ski-jump launches generally limit fuel and weapons loads compared with catapults, though that is my own general analysis and not from the reports.
The American milestone, by contrast, is confirmed. On October 13, an F-35C from Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 23 made the first arrested landing by the type on a Ford-class carrier, the future USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79), off the U.S. East Coast, followed by the first catapult launch the next day. The Navy took preliminary acceptance of the ship on September 29, and USNI says Congress mandated this test because lead ship USS Gerald R. Ford could not operate the Navy’s newest fighter. The new Advanced Arresting Gear and weapons elevators were behind years of Ford-class delays, and Kennedy’s delivery has slipped from July 2025 to 2027. Those delays are a legitimate criticism of the programme.
The “a year behind China” framing, however, compares unlike things. The F-35C has been operating from the Navy’s Nimitz-class carriers since the early 2020s, so the United States has long had stealth fighters at sea. What happened on the Kennedy is a compatibility test on a ship that has not yet been delivered, and Military Watch’s own account of the Fujian’s J-35 is of touch-and-go landings and “operations” from 2026. It also says the Kennedy is scheduled for “launch” in March 2027, but the ship was launched years ago, and delivery is what is scheduled. The claim that China’s sixth-generation carrier fighters will arrive close to a decade before America’s is a projection, not a fact. As we noted in our post on Boeing’s F/A-XX award, the U.S. aircraft is still in development for the 2030s.
Ultimately, these are three different stories and they deserve different levels of confidence. The Liaoning’s deployment is confirmed by all sides, the F-35C landing is confirmed by the Navy, and the J-35 footage is plausible but unofficial. Three markers will show where this goes: an official PLA Navy confirmation that J-35s operate from ski-jump carriers, how the Liaoning group behaves around Japan and in the South China Sea, and the Kennedy’s delivery and first carrier operations. Until then, the safest summary is that both navies are working to put stealth aircraft on their carrier decks, and neither has yet shown it at full scale.
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