By the late 1950s China’s young aircraft industry had learned to build Soviet fighters under licence, but it had no dedicated aircraft for the battlefield-support mission — a fast jet to strike troops, armour and airfields at low level. Around 1958 the Nanchang factory (NAMC, later part of Hongdu) was tasked with designing one, and it took as its starting point the aircraft it already knew best: the MiG-19, built in China as the Shenyang J-6. The new attacker would keep the J-6’s wings, tail surfaces and twin engines, but almost everything forward of the wing would be redrawn.

That redraw is what makes the Q-5 a distinct aircraft rather than a J-6 variant. Engineers deleted the MiG-19’s single nose intake and moved the air inlets to twin semicircular ducts on the fuselage sides, which freed the nose for a solid, pointed radome and gave the pilot a clear view downward for aiming at ground targets. The fuselage was lengthened and area-ruled — given the pinched “wasp-waist” shaping that eases the jump through the sound barrier — and a small internal weapons bay was built in, an unusual feature for a light attack jet of its generation. The changes added weight and shaved a little off the top speed, but they turned an interceptor airframe into a supersonic attacker.

Progress was anything but smooth. The programme was suspended amid the economic turmoil of the early 1960s, then revived; the prototype finally flew on a date commonly cited as 4 June 1965, after which the disruption of the Cultural Revolution slowed the aircraft’s path into squadrons. The Q-5 (from Qiang-5, “attack aircraft No. 5”) entered service around 1970, and over the following decades roughly 1,300 were built in a long line of variants for the PLA Air Force and Navy.

One branch of the family took on a very different task. A small number of Q-5A airframes were modified to carry a single tactical nuclear bomb, delivered by a toss or “loft” manoeuvre that flung the weapon ahead of the aircraft so the pilot could turn and escape the blast; these machines reportedly wore an all-white anti-flash scheme. Chinese and secondary accounts state that a Q-5 carried out an aircraft-delivered nuclear test in January 1972, though the exact details are hard to verify from open sources, and the nuclear-delivery role was reportedly wound down by the end of the 1970s.

Where the Q-5 became best known internationally was as an export product. Sold abroad as the A-5 (the upgraded A-5C being the main export model), it was bought by Pakistan, which became the largest foreign operator, and by Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sudan; North Korea is also reported to have received the type, though this is not well documented. The A-5C could be fitted with Western-compatible pylons and, for some customers, Western short-range missiles, bolting newer weapons onto a fundamentally 1960s airframe.

The Fantan’s combat career was written mostly in other air forces’ colours. Sudan used its A-5s for ground-attack sorties during the conflict in Darfur, and Myanmar employed the type in counter-insurgency operations; Pakistan’s A-5Cs served in the strike role but have no confirmed record of combat use. In China the type was steadily replaced by newer aircraft such as the JH-7, and the PLA is generally reported to have retired its remaining Q-5s around 2017, closing out nearly half a century of service.