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 – South Korea will receive four Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial systems in 2015 and 2016 under an order that is in the final stages of negotiation. The U.S. State Department is likely to advise Congress within a few weeks of the proposed sale, which also will include the ground infrastructure for the surveillance aircraft. A U.S. official says that the contract will be worth about $850 million. Two of the aircraft will be delivered in 2015 and the other two in 2016.
Leithen Francis (Singapore), Bradley Perrett (Beijing)
Call it a case of being let down by one's older brother: New delays in the certification of the Comac ARJ21 regional jet could force the development of the C919 mainline commercial aircraft to be prolonged. The FAA is insisting its shadow certification effort on the ARJ21 be completed before the agency begins work on the C919. But the C919 is already near the point at which a certification agency needs to be brought in; if the project advances much further without the FAA's involvement, the U.S. regulator may decide it can never become involved.
Forget death and taxes. Probably the surest thing in aerospace these days is that South Korea will want serious technology transfer in any major military equipment order. The country's manufacturers are increasingly confident in their ability to win manufacturing contracts without the compulsion of offsets. More and more, they and the government want the know-how behind the systems that the country buys, with the aim of making the next generation themselves.
