Topic: Yang Wei

Yang Wei (杨伟, 1963 - ) is a Chinese aircraft designer.

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 Industrial University. Yang first joined the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute in the late 1980s, and by the age of 38, he was promoted to the highest rank within the institute — director of the institute.

Since 1998, Yang has become the general designer of numerous aircraft, and he is also one of the founders of fully digitized fly-by-wire control systems 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 from scratch for FC-1, a record that remains unbroken in China today, and this was achieved while Yang was also the general designer of the Chengdu J-10 double seated version. Although only being the general designer of the twin seater version of the Chengdu J-10, Yang was the chief engineer of the digital fly-by-wire control systems for both the single seater and the twin seater version of the Chengdu J-10. Due to the nature of his work, Yang's achievements were kept secret and it was not until January 2007 when Chengdu J-10 was finally confirmed by the official Chinese governmental acknowledgement that his name and contributions begin to appear in a very limited fashion on official Chinese governmental websites, such as the military websites of the Xinhua News Agency.