Inlet distortion is typically encountered during the off-design conditions on civil aircrafts and in S-ducts in military aircrafts. It is known to severely deteriorate the performance of a gas-turbine engine. As the intakes get shorter, there is an increased interaction between the inlet distortion and the downstream fan. Previous studies in the literature use low-fidelity methods (RANS or URANS) to address this unsteady interaction, due the substantial computational cost associated with the high fidelity methods like LES/DNS. On the other hand, it is well known that the low order methods like RANS have limitations to accurately represent the distorted flows. In this paper, we propose a mixed-fidelity approach and employ it to study the intake-fan interaction at an affordable computational cost. The results demonstrate that there are two ways through which the fan affects the separated flow. Firstly, the suction effect of the fan alleviates the undesired distortion by ‘directly’ changing the streamline curvature, intensifying the turbulence transport and closing the recirculation bubble much earlier. Secondly, the enhanced turbulence in the vicinity of the fan feeds back into the initial growth of the shear layer by means of the recirculating flow. This ‘indirect’ feedback is found to increase the turbulence production during the initial stages of the shear layer. Both the direct and indirect effects of the fan significantly suppress the inlet distortion. © ISROMAC 2017. All rights reserved.