PLA Daily 2007-01-15

　　The 46-year-old Li Zhonghua is a senior colonel, the deputy commander of a flight test regiment of the PLA Air Force, a special-class pilot of the PLA Air Force, a meritorious pilot, one of the first batch of double-bachelor degree test pilots in China and an international test pilot.

　　Flipping trough the records of the outstanding Chinese test pilots, one will not fail to notice that Li's name is closely related with these brilliant records.

　　As one of the chief test pilots of the home made J-10 fighter, he set six flying records in maximum flight indicated speed, maximum dynamic ceiling, maximum overload value, maximum angle of attack, maximum instantaneous banking-turn angular speed and minimum flight speed.

　　He test-flew 61 highly difficult subjects of home-produced new-type fighters in five years, and 57 of which are Category-I risk subjects.

　　He was the first to master the stall trailing vortex test flight skill of a home-produced delta-wing fighter and a heavy-duty fighter, which filled in a gap in domestic test flight.

　　He was the first to fly S-27 fighter among the Chinese test pilots and perform the highly difficult stunt known as "cobra maneuver", and he outnumbered all the other Chinese pilots in doing the same stunt.

　　He has test-flown 26 versions of three types of aircraft including fighters, bombers and transport planes with a record of 2250 hours of accident-free flight.

　　He had the record of successful handling 15 mid-air dangerous situations and five major ones. He was awarded one First-Class Merit, five Second-Class Merits and six Third-Class Merits.

　　He was rewarded with one special-class prize and one second-class prize of National Scientific and Technological Progress Award, and was granted successively four First-Class Merits, five Second-Class Merits and six Third-Class Merits by the national aviation industry department.