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 liberalization of general aviation in China has reached the northernmost part of the country, with the civil aviation administration approving a trial of sight-seeing flights at Gegeen-gol in Inner Mongolia. The trial, however, is of exactly the type that aircraft manufacturers are least interested in seeing—one that is in a remote part of the country where the authorities see minimal safety challenges but where demand for aircraft will be slight.
BEIJING — The Japanese air force believes it can repair as many as six of 18 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries F-2Bs that were immersed in seawater in the March 11 tsunami at Matsushima air base. The air force estimates the repairs would cost 5-6 billion yen ($61-73 million) per aircraft, a figure quite comparable with the price of new fighters elsewhere. The work would take five years.
It is a bit like waiting for a pot to boil. There is a lot of noise coming from the Chinese industry as it announces an extraordinary range of programs covering almost the whole field of civil aviation manufacturing, but so far not much is bubbling to the surface in the form of complete new aircraft. This pot will probably boil over with products in the 2020s. The fire under it is state funding, fueled by the techno-nationalism that pervades the thinking of the Chinese government.
