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 Eastern Airlines will seek to defer or cancel half of the aircraft it has contracted to receive this year. Announcing a turnaround plan that largely matched earlier reports, the massively indebted and routinely unprofitable carrier says it will sell stakes in subsidiaries and aim to cut costs by 15%.
China will build complete outer wings for Airbus A320-family aircraft from the end of this year, following the conclusion of an agreement between Airbus and Xi’an Aircraft Industry Co. The deal, the second between Airbus and a Chinese manufacturer this month, will avoid the cost of sending Xi’an-built outer wing boxes to Britain for completion and then back to China’s A320 family final assembly plant now operating at Tianjin.
BEIJING—The Australian Transport Safety Bureau added a second, similar incident to its investigation of the Oct. 7, 2008, uncommanded nose-down pitch event involving a Qantas Airbus A330-300. The safety panel expects to issue a preliminary report this month. Both incidents involved faults with air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs), and both occurred off the West Coast of Australia, where the U.S. and Australian navies operate a low-frequency radio communications station.
