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 government has deregulated pricing of domestic business and first-class air fares, abolishing a rule that they must be set at 1.5 and 1.3 times the price of economy tickets, respectively. The change opens the way for China Southern to widely introduce lie-flat seats that it has tried in an Airbus A330. The carrier could not get permission to charge the price it wanted for that service level, three times the economy fare, a company executive says.
BEIJING – Kawasaki Heavy Industries is considering a joint venture with a foreign aerospace company to build and support a minimum-change civil version of its XC-2 airlifter, the YCX. The partner would share the cost of increasing the production rate of two to four aircraft a year that Kawasaki would handle on its own, in addition to an intended Ministry of Defense order for possibly 40 aircraft of the military version.
Vietnam Airlines will formally join SkyTeam on June 10, a move that will increase the alliance’s members to 10 carriers. Earlier this month, the carrier and Air France agreed that the French airline’s flights between Bangkok and Paris will carry the Vietnam Airlines code. Delta Air Lines already has U.S. Department of Transport approval to carry the Vietnam Airlines code.
