You know what is amazing?
3 Islamic countries developing their own separate 5th gen Fighters:-
Why not share the workload and development cost
@Neo ? Not enough trust? Or maybe you figured its easy to do a paint-job on a Chinese jet rather than spend effort on actually developing one?
The Turkish one might turn out to be decent of the British BAE honor their contract, but that is about it.
BAE is not going to share critical technology with Turkey. You can be assured of that. BAE never promised that in the first place. It only promised to give consultancy. Turkey by the way has invited Pakistan for its 5th generation plane. Even Indonesia was said to have joined in the 5th generation bandwagon.
The problem with the approach of Turkey, Pakistan etc is that they don't even know to make 4th generation plane. 5th generation plane has stealthy airframe but other than that it is a 4th generation plane with additional characteristics like stealth, AESA, sensor fusion etc. 4th generation plane is the first step towards 5th generation plane. Neither Turkey, nor Pakistan has the educated manpower required for the high end research and manufacturing.
It is impossible to directly make a 5th generation plan from scratch or even by reverse engineering as many things like software codes are impossible to reverse engineer and has to be carefully written and debugged continuously. The nuances of the coordination is also written in the codes which means features like sensor fusion is impossible to reverse engineer.
Even items like AESA radar, fire controls need years of work and testing. It is not that simple to make an advanced aircraft with advanced avionics based on electronics. The manual planes may be made and even the mechanical components of the plane like gears, missile pod etc can be reverse engineered. But the exact coordination between various components which rely on codes can't be reverse engineered and needs to have a source code or years of software writing and testing from scratch, in each step learning what is required and what is not. This step by step programming will also require active support from scientists and engineers designing the components which further complicates things.
India has excellent programming base, even in electronics. Despite not having chip fabrication plants in India, India is the leader when it comes to chip designing. India also has extensive experience designing radars and engine FADEC. Tejas development which gave enormous experience to India helps in further refining things for 5th generation planes. Despite all this, AMCA is only set to fully be ready by 2025 and trials till 2027 It may even get delayed till 2030.
Turkey and Pakistan lacks even the basic experience for 5th generation fighter and it is unwise to expect them to make it before 2040 even if they find needed talent