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.
The Chinese military is either confident that it can already win a battle in the Taiwan Strait, or it is confident that it can keep winning the budget battles back in Beijing. With the ex-Soviet carrier Varyag now mobile near the northern port of Dalian, China has joined the aircraft carrier club. And in completing the ship, with its limited use in narrow waters, the country has left behind one of the guiding principles of its defense acquisitions—that the first priority after nuclear deterrence is subjugating Taiwan.
BEIJING — The South Korean air force rates all of the Western competitors for its F-X Phase 3 fighter program, including the F-35 Lightning, as capable of meeting the in-service date of 2016, an assessment that appears to raise the chances of the Lockheed Martin aircraft. The air force does not express the same view on the fourth and most recent competitor for the planned 60-aircraft order, the Sukhoi PAK FA.
BEIJING — The Japanese defense ministry does not yet know whether newly discovered structural faults will delay delivery of the first four Kawasaki Heavy Industries P-1 maritime patrol aircraft. Cracks and tears were found in several places on two P-1s after ground tests, a ministry spokesman says. Some were in the integral fuel tanks of the mainplane and others in the fuselage near the wing root. They are 15-20 cm (6-8 in.) long.
