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.
Japan Airlines is seeking 2,700 voluntary early retirements as it works on cutting its payroll by 15,700. Most of the reductions should come from the main flying operation in the group, Japan Airlines International. The company, under bankruptcy protection from creditors and being reorganized with government help, posted an operating loss of ¥120.8 billion (US$1.35 billion) from April to December, compared with ¥8.8 billion a year earlier.
South Korea’s technologically ambitious defense ministry aims to test a scaled demonstrator for a stealthy combat drone by 2013, extending the country’s expertise in unmanned aircraft and hedging against cancellation of the KF-X fighter program. With this project, South Korea will be within 10 years of Britain and Germany in flying substantial development hardware for unmanned combat aircraft. South Korea may be ahead of Japan, which has announced no such development effort.
BEIJING — South Korea’s technologically ambitious Agency for Defense Development aims to test a scaled demonstrator for a stealthy combat drone by 2013. Korea Aerospace Industries is well placed to win the project, since it has already embarked on company-funded work to acquire technology in this field, going as far as designing an aircraft that it calls K-UCAV and flying a 20 percent scale model of it.
