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 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) hopes next year to begin full-scale development of its three-stage Advanced Solid Rocket (ASR), with a first launch to follow in 2012 or 2013. To be built by IHI Aerospace, the ASR is Japan’s proposed future launcher for medium scientific payloads.
Kunpeng Airlines will be the latest Chinese airline to fall more directly under government control after the Henan provincial government agreed to recapitalize it this month. The investment is part of a broad trend in which Chinese provinces and cities are buying into airlines that, typically, are adopting the geographic name of their new government owner. In the case of Kunpeng, set up two years ago by Shenzhen Airlines and Mesa Airlines of the U.S., the new name will be Henan Airlines, according to state media reports.
China’s specialist builder of large military and civil airplanes, Avic Aircraft, will become a publicly traded company by 2011, using a subsidiary for a backdoor stock market listing. Restructuring of the company’s assets will be done by the first quarter of 2010, says General Manager Hu Xiaofeng. Assets worth 8 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) will be moved into the subsidiary, Xi’an Aircraft International Corp., a listed unit of Xi’an Aircraft.
