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.
China Southern Airlines will operate Embraer 190s in Xinjiang, the western territory of China that rival Comac sees as a natural market for its ARJ21 regional jet. The leasing arm of China Development Bank will buy 10 Embraer 190s to be operated by China Southern, with deliveries beginning in the second half of this year, Embraer and the lessor say in a joint statement. CD Leasing and Embraer signed a framework agreement covering aircraft sales in 2009.
China is advancing its space capabilities by developing staged combustion, an engine technology that is likely to offer greater performance for the Long March 6 and 7, two of a family of launchers that the country will field around the middle of the decade. The smaller of the two, the Long March 6, may be the first to go into service, beating the flagship third member of the family, the Long March 5 heavy launcher.
The plant building the CALT Long March 5 has proved its technology for precise assembly of large-diameter sections with friction-stir welding, a key achievement as the program moves toward a 2014 first flight. The 211th Factory at the Tianjin industrial base used that and other advanced manufacturing technologies in building an engineering sample of a short section of the Long March 5’s second stage, a liquid-hydrogen tank, says national space contractor CASC.
