Modern airman is 'pilot by day, coder by night'

By day, Wang Zihao straps into the cockpit of a Y-20, China's most advanced homegrown heavy transport aircraft. By night, he sits before a computer screen, debugging code.

The 20-something pilot and operations officer embodies a new generation of Chinese airmen — one for whom lines of software are as vital to combat readiness as their stick-and-rudder skills. His mission: to turn every pilot's frustration into a fix, and every fix into a force multiplier.

Wang's journey into coding began when he arrived at his regiment for conversion training on the Y-20. He was struck by the "digital innovation" culture around him — especially by a suite of apps developed by a fellow pilot.

"I realized that a pilot's flying skills are combat power — but a pilot's innovative thinking is the accelerator of combat power," Wang said.

He joined the regiment's innovation studio and began teaching himself to code between flights. When his own code was incorporated into a mission planning tool, he felt a surge of pride. "I was the user and the developer at the same time," he said. "As a front-line pilot, I know exactly which features are clunky and which data is redundant."

His first major test came in February, when his crew flew to Singapore to provide fuel support for the August 1st Air Demonstration Team, China's most renowned aerobatic team. Approaching in sweltering heat and humidity, Wang found the aircraft's landing profile drifting off course. He corrected it with his captain's help, but the debriefing that followed proved frustrating. "What was the right reference thrust setting? When exactly did the glide path start shifting?" he recalled. The questions gnawed at him.

Traditional debriefing relied on data readouts and cockpit displays — but lacked the visceral sense of being back in the air. Wang decided to build a virtual-reality system that would let pilots relive any flight from the first-person perspective. With no template to follow, he read academic papers, disassembled equipment and consulted experts. Two months later, the first VR debrief system was ready.

Now pilots can don VR headsets and replay every phase of a flight — from takeoff to landing — as if they were back in the seat. For new destinations or unfamiliar maneuvers, experienced pilots can record a "ghost flight" for others to study, building situational awareness before they ever leave the ground.

"Seeing my comrades use my product and say 'this thing is great' — that made my heart sing," he said.

For Wang, the project taught him a larger lesson. "I learned to spot problems with a pilot's eye and solve them with an engineer's brain," he said.

As China's air force modernizes at a rapid clip, Wang sees his generation as uniquely positioned to bridge the analogue and digital worlds. "I need to fly every sortie as if it were combat, and treat every pain point as a starting point for improvement," he said. "When the mission comes, my comrades and I will take off, and I hope the work I do makes them feel more confident."