Bradley Perrett covered China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. He is a Mandarin-speaking Australian.
Before joining Aviation Week in 2006 he was a macroeconomics, politics and aerospace journalist with Reuters. Perrett holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Macquarie University, Sydney. He left Aviation Week in 2020.
BEIJING — Chinese officials have declared complete success for the Shenzhou 8 mission of their manned space program, after the capsule — designed for human transportation but unmanned on this occasion — returned to Earth on Nov. 17. The mission’s chief objective was to show that Shenzhou 8 could dock with the Tiangong 1 orbital laboratory, which was also unmanned. The procedure was executed twice.
Heavy airframe maintenance hangers keep rising across China, and plenty more are on the drawing board. The problem is that wages also keep rising, faster than almost anywhere. In an economy that grows at 10% a year, industries are forever competing with each other for skills, and for eager young people to train. At some point, the Chinese economy will be too sophisticated to be competitive globally in the labor-intensive business of heavy airframe maintenance.
