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 Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) confirmed May 18 that a poorly made oil feed pipe initiated the uncontained failure of a Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine on Qantas Airbus A380 on Nov. 4. No one was injured in the incident, which occurred shortly after takeoff from Singapore, but the aircraft suffered systems and fuselage damage as a result of the uncontained failure. The aircraft (VH-0QA) remains in Singapore awaiting repair.
A Shanghai court has ordered 15 pilots who quit working for a state airline to pay their former employer 2.1 million yuan ($322,000) each in compensation for the cost of their training. The state airline, whose name has not been revealed, failed in its attempt to recover a further 7.55 million yuan from each pilot as compensation for the resources they used in accumulating experience—those resources presumably being the aircraft and facilities that the airline was concurrently employing to earn money from passengers.
In the May 11 story headlined “Australia Cuts Defense As U.S. Dollar Makes Imports Cheaper,” the amount saved in the defense budget over four years should have been stated as AU$5.3 billion ($5.7 billion). In addition to cuts of AU$4.3 billion, AU$1 billion of currency savings are automatically taken by the Treasury.
