The Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) on Sunday, which has bred many Chinese military aircraft, opened a park for meritorious aircraft in the nation’s first test flight base in northwest China’s Shaanxi province, exhibiting 16 models that made their names in the nation’s military aviation history.

The 16 aircraft on exhibition are from the 1960s and each one carries a piece of history of the test flight base, or China Feixing Shiyan Academe, which recently saw its 60th founding anniversary.

Sitting in Yanliang County of Xi’an, the base was founded on April 15, 1959, ushering in a new era of China’s independent flight test industry and making China the fifth country in the world with such an institution, following the US, Russia, the UK, and France.

HongZhuan 502, also known as the CJ-6, a single-engine two-seat propeller basic trainer, was the first model tested in full-machine flight at the base in 1960. It is also the first model designed and manufactured by China, which indicated that China’s aviation industry reached a new stage of self-production.

In the 1960s, the base welcomed China’s first ejection testing vehicle based on the H-5 bomber, the technology of which was used from 1968 to 1985 for multiple fighter jets and bomber jets. In the following two decades, other testing vehicles based on various jets were tested at the base, including those for engine air tests and longitudinal static stability tests.

Models in the modern age are also among the exhibits, including the J-10, a third-generation fighter jet developed by China, and the JH-7, China’s first two-seat, double-engine, supersonic sniper bomber, as well as the CAIC Z-10, China’s first attack helicopter, and the KJ-2000, a large-scale, all-weather, multi-sensor aerial early warning and operational command aircraft developed by China.