China claims to fix design flaw that doomed US X-47B stealth drone

Chinese researchers at the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre, led by Huang Jiangtao, claim to have overcome a critical design bottleneck in stealth aircraft development by creating a new software platform that efficiently optimizes hundreds of aerodynamic and stealth parameters simultaneously. Demonstrated on the US Navy’s X-47B stealth drone—a program previously canceled due to unresolved trade-offs among stealth, aerodynamics, and propulsion—the software optimized 740 variables at once, achieving significant improvements without the exponential increase in computational cost typically associated with such complexity. Their method, published in Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica, uses a geometric sensitivity computation approach that decouples gradient calculation costs from the number of design variables, enabling full-scale aerodynamic and stealth optimization including radar-absorbent materials. This breakthrough addresses the longstanding “curse of dimensionality” in aircraft design, where increasing parameters traditionally force engineers to simplify or compromise. Instead of relying on brute-force computing power, the team employed a “DeepSeek-style