Jiu Tian

China's "flying aircraft carrier" — a roughly 16-tonne jet-powered drone built to disgorge a swarm of 100-plus small drones and loitering munitions from a modular honeycomb belly bay, or to carry missiles and bombs on its wings instead. It is the air-launched face of China industrializing drone mass — the People's Liberation Army's answer to Replicator. It first flew in December 2025, and the swarm function has never been publicly demonstrated.

Overview

The Jiu Tian (九天, "Nine Heavens"; also Jiutian, designated SS-UAV) is a very large, high-altitude Chinese uncrewed aircraft conceived as a "drone mothership" — a jet that carries and releases a swarm of small drones and loitering munitions from a modular ventral "heterogeneous honeycomb" bay, with eight wing hardpoints as an alternative for missiles, bombs or pods. It is officially attributed to AVIC, with the airframe from AVIC's First Aircraft Design & Research Institute in Xi'an. Strategically it reads as China taking drone-swarm mass into the air at industrial scale — a cheap-mass capability pointed at Pacific airbases, US warships and Taiwan's defenses. The essential caveat up front: the Jiu Tian is a prototype in early flight test — it made its first flight in December 2025, the swarm-launch capability that defines it has not been shown working, and analysts question whether a large, slow, non-stealthy mothership can survive contested airspace.

Development

The Jiu Tian was unveiled at the Zhuhai Airshow in November 2024 (as prototype "004"), and AVIC announced its maiden flight on 11 December 2025 from Pucheng County, Shaanxi. The manufacturing chain is reported inconsistently across sources — AVIC's First Aircraft Design & Research Institute as designer, with Xi'an Chida and Shaanxi Unmanned Equipment Technology variously named for build and commissioning — so AVIC is best treated as the umbrella prime. (Earlier reports of a ~mid-2025 "scheduled" flight are superseded by the authoritative December 2025 maiden flight.) It is one strand of a broader Chinese push into drone-swarm mass that also includes the Type 076 Sichuan drone-carrier assault ship and various ground- and sea-launched swarm concepts.

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