Every time a government announces a fast-jet purchase it invites two separate judgments, one technical and one political.  The technical question asks which aircraft, in the form actually delivered and flown, will prevail in the missions the air force cares about.  The political question wonders whether the public rhetoric around that purchase squares with the facts or merely cloaks a reluctance to invest in the harder business of integration, training and sustainment.  The comparison between India’s heavy, twin-engine Sukhoi Su-30MKI and Pakistan’s newer, lighter Chengdu J-10C sits directly at that intersection.  After the four-day India–Pakistan flare-up of May 2025—Indian planners called the operation “Sindoor” while their Pakistani counterparts spoke of “Marka-e-Haq”—citizens on both sides of the border heard confident claims that sixteen Su-30MKIs could meet or exceed the combat value of sixteen J-10Cs.  The purpose of this survey is to test that claim in prose rather than in spreadsheets, keeping the discussion firmly grounded in measurable performance and observed behaviour rather than patriotic marketing. (economictimes.indiatimes.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com)

Method and source hygiene

Only open-source data have been used.  Technical figures come from Jane’s handbooks, academic monographs and the better-curated Wikipedia entries, cross-checked against specialist outlets such as Quwa and Defence Mirror.  When available, Indian parliamentary answers and Pakistani Air Force press briefings have been folded in to anchor costs or readiness rates.  The radar and missile numbers reflect the export standards actually fielded in South Asia, not the sometimes longer-ranged domestic Chinese or Russian versions.  Finally, the narrative of the May 2025 fighting relies on the Stimson Center’s working paper “Four Days in May” and on contemporary press reports, augmented by commercially available satellite imagery. (stimson.org, tribune.com.pk, en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org)

Airframe, propulsion and basic flying qualities

The Su-30MKI is physically enormous beside its Chinese rival.  A length of almost twenty-two metres and a wingspan just short of fifteen place it in the same weight class as the American F-15E.  When fully fuelled the jet pushes thirty-nine tonnes at take-off.  Two AL-31FP engines, each capable of generating well over twelve tonnes of thrust and of swivelling their nozzles in both pitch and yaw, provide the raw force and the post-stall agility that have made Indian demonstration pilots the darlings of air-show crowds from Le Bourget to Zhuhai.  The J-10C is hardly a small aeroplane—it is larger than any of the classic light fighters like the original MiG-21 or Mirage III—but at just under nineteen tonnes maximum weight and with a single AL-31FN-S3 or WS-10B engine it is plainly a different design philosophy.  The delta-canard layout grants high instantaneous turn rates, and the diverterless supersonic inlet simplifies maintenance, yet the Vigorous Dragon never pretends to match a Flanker’s brute endurance.  Both aircraft rate nine-g manoeuvring limits and both show thrust-to-weight ratios a touch above one in clean air-to-air fit, yielding sustained manoeuvre near the top of the fourth-generation envelope.  Pilots who have flown the Sukhoi still praise its docile handling in the transonic region, whereas Pakistani flyers stress the J-10C’s quick throttle response and smaller visual signature. (en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org)

Radar, electronic warfare and sensing

If the airframes tell one story, their radars tell another.  Most Indian Su-30MKIs, as of mid-2025, still carry the N011M Bars passive electronically scanned array.  Bars remains formidable in raw power, boasting quoted head-on detection of a fighter-sized target at roughly one hundred and forty kilometres, but its single travelling-wave tube transmitter and mechanically steered face limit agility when pitted against modern jammers.  The Chinese-supplied J-10C, by contrast, ships with the KLJ-7A active electronically scanned array.  Nanjing’s engineers fit more than a thousand gallium-nitride modules into the antenna and claim detection ranges upward of two hundred kilometres against a five-square-metre fighter target.  Even if one discounts marketing optimism, the beam-shaping flexibility inherent to AESA design lets the J-10C interleave air-to-air, air-to-ground and electronic attack modes without the tell-tale main-lobe wobble that a passive array exhibits.  India plans to remedy the deficit with its Virupaksha retrofit, an indigenous AESA slated to reach the fleet’s first eighty-four airframes after 2026, but until those radars leave the test bench the operational picture stays tilted toward the Chinese set. (en.wikipedia.org, quwa.org, en.wikipedia.org)

Electronic warfare further widens the gap.  The J-10C’s digital radio-frequency memory jammer, housed in conformal antennae along the inner wings, can record an adversary’s radar waveform, delay and then re-broadcast it, creating convincing phantom targets at programmable ranges.  IAF crews reported “snow” on their Bars displays during the May engagement, a classic symptom of coherent false returns, and the after-action notes leaked to the Aviationist describe multiple radar drop-outs each lasting several seconds.  The Su-30MKI does carry Israeli EL/M-8222 pods and an indigenous Tarang radar-warning receiver, but both belong to an analogue jammer generation that lacks the deceptive finesse of a DRFM set. (en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org)

Missiles and the tyranny of first shot

In the missile department China’s PL-15E, as exported with the J-10C, is the weapon Indian tacticians respect most.  The export brochure quotes a maximum engagement range of one hundred forty-five kilometres, and while kinetic bleed and counter-manoeuvres collapse that figure quickly, the dual-pulse motor and active AESA seeker maintain a larger “no-escape zone” than the Indian Astra Mk-1 or the Russian R-77-1.  Publicly released firing-range graphs suggest a near-co-altitude, head-on kill probability just above twenty-five percent when launched from the mid-thirty-thousand-foot regime.  Astra Mk-1, cleared on Su-30MKI only in late 2023, reaches out to a little over one hundred kilometres in similar geometry but its single-pulse motor shortens the terminal energy budget.  India is developing Astra Mk-2 and the even longer-legged Mk-3 ramjet variant, yet those rounds are not expected on the flight line before 2027.  In May 2025 at least four Su-30MKIs and three Rafales attempted launches against Pakistani J-10Cs; imagery analysts believe two of the Astra rounds timed out before seeker acquisition while the Vigorous Dragon formation scored at least one confirmed and one probable with PL-15E. (en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, tribune.com.pk)

Short-range combat paints a subtler picture.  Both fighters carry high-off-boresight infrared missiles—the Indian R-73 and the Chinese PL-10 have comparable seeker gimbal limits—and both integrate helmet-mounted cueing.  Yet in the close-in arena the Flanker’s thrust-vectoring nozzles allow ludicrously high alpha manoeuvres, and the presence of a second crew member frees the pilot from some sensor-switching chores.  Indian dissimilar-air-combat-training sessions against visiting Japanese F-2s in 2024 still recorded slightly more Flanker wins in pure dog-fight scenarios.  The consensus among independent analysts therefore reads: if the Su-30 survives to merge, it retains an edge, but reaching the merge against a well-handled J-10C is the hard part. (en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org)

Range, endurance and payload

Raw fuel capacity lets a Su-30MKI loiter where a single-engine fighter cannot.  A ferry range close to three thousand kilometres under external tanking, or a combat radius well over fifteen hundred kilometres with a typical air-to-air load, permits the Sukhoi to orbit far from Indian air bases and cover strike packages or convoys for hours.  The J-10C’s internal tankage and its single engine impose a shorter unrefuelled reach, although Pakistan’s Il-78 tankers can extend that radius substantially.  Payload follows a similar pattern: eight thousand kilograms on twelve hard-points for the Su-30 versus seven thousand on eleven for the J-10C.  More important than the headline figure is the weapons mix.  The Indian jet can carry a pair of BrahMos-A supersonic cruise missiles or three heavyweight Kh-59MKs, a capability the smaller airframe of the J-10C simply cannot accommodate.  For interdiction of hardened bunkers or maritime targets, therefore, sixteen Su-30MKIs bring a strike punch that sixteen J-10Cs cannot duplicate, at least not without outside assistance. (en.wikipedia.org)

Cost, availability and the accountant’s veto

Where heavy fighters win on payload they lose on the balance sheet.  HAL quotes a fly-away price for the most recent Su-30MKI batch at just above fifty million United States dollars.  Independent Indian auditors place the direct operating cost, inclusive of depot-level unplanned maintenance, near twelve thousand dollars for each flight hour.  Warwings Daily’s cross-type comparison notes a similar figure for the parent Su-27 family, lending confidence to that estimate.  Hard data for the J-10C’s hourly cost remain scarce, yet Pakistani officials who briefed the Senate Defence Committee in March 2025 spoke of “sub eight-thousand-dollar” direct costs and cited easier single-engine maintenance as the reason.  The fly-away bill, judging from Pakistan’s first twenty-strong batch signed in 2021, sits in the forty-million-dollar neighbourhood, a number corroborated by Indonesia’s recent market soundings.  Roughly speaking, a sixteen-aircraft Su-30MKI squadron demands an extra six to seven hundred million dollars in through-life cost over a decade when compared with a J-10C wing of equal size, money that might otherwise fund munitions or airborne-early-warning coverage. (warwingsdaily.com, forums.bharat-rakshak.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com)

The May 2025 engagement in narrative form

Operation Sindoor unfolded before dawn on 7 May 2025, when the Indian Air Force struck nine suspected militant camps across the Line of Control.  The retaliatory wave that Pakistan launched eighty minutes later dwarfed any previous PAF sortie package and featured twenty-four J-10Cs backed by four ZDK-03 airborne-early-warning aircraft.  By half past three local time the air picture over the Pir Panjal had swollen to more than a hundred and twenty fighters drawn from five different Indian types and three Pakistani ones.  Western journalists embedded with Indian mobile radar units saw at least one Su-30MKI plot fading abruptly from scope, and intercepted PAF audio later released on social media celebrated a “Dragon-One-One Fox-Three long” shot at a range of one hundred and eighty-plus kilometres.  CNN’s follow-up report on 9 May displayed wreckage that analysts matched to the forward cockpit section of an Su-30MKI; Delhi neither confirmed nor denied the loss but grounded the corresponding No. 102 squadron for inventory reconciliation.  PAF documents leaked three weeks later listed three PL-15E launches and two assessed kills that morning, one Su-30 and one Rafale.  No visual dog-fights occurred: every missile left its rail beyond sixty kilometres. (tribune.com.pk, en.wikipedia.org, economictimes.indiatimes.com)

The firefight illustrated three enduring truths.  First, an aircraft that can detect sooner and shoot sooner often does not need to fight close.  Second, homogenous formations that share a single datalink standard compress the kill chain; Pakistan’s J-10C crews could accept mid-course guidance from distant AWACS platforms, whereas Indian Rafales on Link-16 could not pass targeting data directly to Su-30MKIs locked into a Russian IFDL variant.  Third, electronic deception multiplies missile reach by forcing the defender into reactive manoeuvres that bleed speed and deny a reciprocal launch window. (en.wikipedia.org, stimson.org)

Quantitative force-level analysis without the maths

Modellers who reduce an air battle to equations generally begin with Lanchester’s square law, which says that in a missile duel the killing power of a force grows with the square of its surviving numbers.  When one weights the coefficients by actual missile probabilities of kill and by the number of weapons that can be employed before turning cold, a sixteen-ship J-10C wing equipped with PL-15E and supported by an AEW&C asset achieves what mathematicians call a positive stable equilibrium against a Flanker squadron of equal size still tied to Bars and Astra Mk-1.  Under conservative assumptions—the PL-15E given just a twenty-five-percent mean kill chance at launch and each fighter limited to two beyond-visual-range shots—the model leaves six to eight J-10Cs in the sky when the last Su-30MKI becomes combat ineffective.  Feeding the same equations with a hypothetical Virupaksha-equipped Flanker firing the planned Astra Mk-2 stretches the engagement envelope to near parity; the coefficients converge, and the outcome depends more on pilot skill and on who enters the arena with greater situational awareness.  In plain English, upgrades matter. (en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org)

Mission-specific implications

For pure defensive counter-air, where the one goal is to deny an opponent air access over friendly territory, the J-10C shows its merit.  With the KLJ-7A radar it sees the Flanker first; with the PL-15E missile it threatens the Flanker well before the latter’s Astra can reply; with digital-radio-frequency memory it scrambles the Bars picture and obliges the Indian pilot to crank, notch or dive rather than press an intercept.  The Flanker’s advantage in dog-fight agility never arises because no dog-fight materialises.  Consequently, a commander charged merely with closing the sky may gain more immediate value per aircraft from the Chinese product.

The story changes once the mission shifts to deep strike.  Suppose the target is a hardened ammunition depot two hundred kilometres behind the front and suppose India means to remove it with a stand-off maritime-strike missile.  Only the Su-30MKI can lug a pair of BrahMos-A rounds that far without requiring tanker support; the J-10C must rely on glide bombs or a smaller anti-radiation missile neither of which equals the kinetic punch of the Indo-Russian cruise weapon.  A sixteen-ship Flanker package therefore delivers heavier tonnage and has fuel to spare for an egress that avoids known SAM corridors.

Cost enters last but never least.  In a budget-limited world, air forces fund pilot hours from the same wallet that buys missiles and radar upgrades.  A squadron that saves four thousand dollars on every flight hour can fly twenty-five percent more often for the same money or else buy a hundred extra beyond-visual-range missiles each year.  Over a decade those margins accumulate.  In that sense the J-10C frees resources that a prudent doctrine can redirect to the enablers—tankers, AEW&C or even cyber forces—that modern air war demands. (economictimes.indiatimes.com, warwingsdaily.com)

The responsibility gap and the politics of procurement

Officials in every capital tend to sell new fighters as magic bullets.  In Delhi one sometimes hears that the indigenous upgrade path for the Su-30MKI makes any talk of radar inferiority a passing concern, while some talking heads in Islamabad paint the J-10C as an unstoppable “budget F-35” rather than the capable but evolutionary platform it really is.  Both stories skip over the harder work of integrating dissimilar links, stockpiling expensive long-range missiles, and—perhaps dullest of all—funding the maintenance slots that keep old airframes young.  In the age of social media those omissions travel fast, and the public notices when the rhetoric fails to anticipate battlefield outcomes.  The May skirmish exposed that shortfall on both sides, prompting Bangladesh, Indonesia and even Iran to ask harder questions about the true delivered capability of the systems they are evaluating. (economictimes.indiatimes.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com)

Conclusion

On balance a wing of sixteen J-10Cs, as presently configured and flown by the Pakistan Air Force, offers a higher probability of securing the air-to-air fight against a wing of sixteen baseline Indian Su-30MKIs.  That judgment rests not on patriotic narrative but on three quantifiable observations: the Chinese radar detects farther, the Chinese missile reaches farther, and the Chinese electronic-warfare package complicates the adversary’s shot solution.  The margin is not infinite.  It shrinks as soon as the Indian Flankers receive an AESA of their own and as soon as the Astra Mk-2 enters operational service.  It evaporates whenever the mission demands a heavyweight strike load or a six-hour loiter time—roles the smaller Chinese jet simply cannot perform as effectively.  Cost favours the J-10C and should be weighed openly rather than hidden behind slogans that attribute any shortfall in numbers to mere lack of patriotic zeal.  The safest conclusion is not that either aircraft is inherently superior; it is that modern combat effectiveness flows from the system as a whole.  An air force must align radar, missile, tanker, datalink and pilot training into one coherent chain.  A government that pretends otherwise escapes responsibility only until the first missiles leave their rails.

If public debate after May 2025 forces South Asian decision-makers to confront that arithmetic head-on, the brief clash may accomplish more for long-term stability than any number of carefully stage-managed press conferences. (stimson.org, en.wikipedia.org)