Yang Wei (; born May 1963) is a Chinese aerospace engineer and

aircraft designer Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is si ...

. He is a vice president of the

China Association for Science and Technology The China Association for Science and Technology (CAST; ) is a mass organization of Chinese scientists and engineers, which is composed of multiple national professional societies and hundreds of branches at various local and international level ...

(中国科学技术协会) and a member of the

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS); ), known by Academia Sinica in English until the 1980s, is the national academy of the People's Republic of China for natural sciences. It has historical origins in the Academia Sinica during the Republ ...

(中国科学院), class of 2017. He is also a member of the

Chinese Communist Party The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the CCP emerged victoriou ...

Biography

Yang was born in

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

in 1963 with ancestral roots in

Zizhong County Zizhong County is a county of Sichuan Province Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a ...

Neijiang Neijiang (; Sichuanese Pinyin: Nui4jiang1; Sichuanese pronunciation: ; ) is a prefecture-level city in the southeast of Sichuan province, People's Republic of China. It is located on the Tuo River, midway between the two major cities of Chengdu ...

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

province.

Education and early career

Yang was the youngest general designer China ever had, completing his undergraduate education by the age of 19, and graduate education by the age of 22 from the

Northwestern Polytechnical University Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU; ) is a national key public research university in Xi'an, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The university is a Chinese national Class A Double ...

. Yang first joined the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute in the late 1980s, and in late 2001, at the age of 38, he was promoted to the highest rank within the institute as its director.

Career

Since 1998, Yang has become the general designer of numerous

aircraft An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air. It counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines ...

, and he is also one of the founders of fully digitized

fly-by-wire control systems Fly-by-wire (FBW) is a system that replaces the conventional manual flight controls of an aircraft with an electronic interface. The movements of flight controls are converted to electronic signals transmitted by wires, and flight control c ...

in China, a feat that greatly helped him become general designer of aircraft. Under his leadership, it took less than four years to achieve a

maiden flight The maiden flight, also known as first flight, of an aircraft is the first occasion on which it leaves the ground under its own power. The same term is also used for the first launch of rockets. The maiden flight of a new aircraft type is alwa ...

from scratch for

FC-1 The CAC/PAC JF-17 Thunder ( ur , جے ایف-17 گرج), or FC-1 ''Xiaolong'' (), is a lightweight, single-engine, multi-role combat aircraft developed jointly by the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation (CAC) of China and the Pakistan Aeronautica ...

, a record that remains unbroken in China today, and this was achieved while Yang was also the general designer of the

Chengdu J-10 The Chengdu J-10 Vigorous Dragon (; NATO reporting name: Firebird), is a medium-weight, single-engine, multirole combat aircraft capable of all-weather operations, configured with a delta wing and canard design, with fly-by-wire flight contr ...

double seated version. Although only being the general designer of the twin seater version of the

, Yang was the chief engineer of the digital

for both the single seater and the twin seater version of the

. Due to the nature of his work, Yang's achievements were kept secret and it wasn't until January, 2007 that

began to appear in a very limited fashion on official Chinese governmental websites, such as the

Xinhua News Agency Xinhua News Agency (English pronunciation: )J. C. Wells: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd ed., for both British and American English, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua ...

Awards

Recipient of Pakistan's high civilian honour

Sitara-e-Imtiaz The Sitara-e-Imtiaz () also spelled as Sitara-i-Imtiaz, is the third-highest (in the order of "Imtiaz") honour and Civil decorations of Pakistan, civilian award in the State of Pakistan. It recognizes individuals who have made an "especially m ...

in 2017 for his services to design JF-17 Aircraft.

References

External links

Yang Wei and FC-1/JF-17 Thunder Fighter
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yang, Wei 1963 births Living people Alternate members of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Chinese aircraft designers Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Northwestern Polytechnical University alumni Recipients of Sitara-i-Imtiaz