At an airport on the southern edge of the Mu Us Desert in Ningxia, northwest China, engineers and scientists conduct a test flight on a jet plane that the world has never seen.

According to some recently disclosed design drawings, this mysterious fighter aircraft, powered by a dual-inlet turbojet engine, boasts a blended wing body design with sweeping delta wings, a hallmark of high-speed stealth fighters, reports South China Morning Post.

And what happens during the flight is nothing short of extraordinary: a segment of each of the wings detaches from the fighter, metamorphosing into two “flying wing” drones propelled by electric ducted fans.

Immediately after the drones’ separation, however, the fighter experiences a tremor, a consequence of the abrupt wing area reduction and gravity centre shift that significantly alters its aerodynamic profile.

Nevertheless, the aircraft and the drones quickly resume stable flight, demonstrating the effectiveness of the aerodynamic design and automatic control algorithms.

The successful test flight proves a “new concept” for the Chinese Air Force’s next generation fighter jet, according to Du Xin, a senior engineer with the Aerospace Technology Institute of the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre (CARDC), which has been sanctioned by the US.

“It represents an advanced mode of manned/unmanned collaborative combat, where multiple aircraft with different functions are integrated for coordinated flight,” Du and his colleagues wrote in a peer-reviewed paper published on May 29 in the Chinese academic journal Advances in Aeronautical Science and Engineering.