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.
Long-haul, low-cost carrier AirAsia X plans to set up a hub somewhere in the Middle East, seeking the benefits of networked services but breaking the rule that budget airlines should fly only from point to point. New destinations could include Spain, Turkey, the Czech Republic and Morocco. “This will open up completely new markets, and we won’t always have to have the planes based in Kuala Lumpur, which limits us to an eight-hour radius [of AirAsia X’s A330s],” says Chief Executive Officer Azran Osman-Rani.
Australian carrier Virgin Blue expects to go shopping for cheap aircraft amid the economic downturn after announcing it has raised A$231 million (US$190 million). Chief Executive Officer Brett Godfrey also announced he will retire next year from the airline, which has plunged into losses, partly because of its fledgling long-haul arm, V Australia. Godfrey has led Virgin Blue since it began flying in 2000.
MELBOURNE, Australia — The market for the Australian-U.S. Nulka naval decoy may be expanding by a factor of two, thanks to a prospective easing of restrictions on exports of the hovering rocket. As the system is fitted to ever-larger ships previously thought impossible to defend with decoys, there are signs that it will even go aboard the largest of all — U.S. aircraft carriers — giving them one more defense layer to add to the several that already surround them.
