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.
A Saab proposal to co-develop a stealth fighter with South Korea is raising the prospect of an Asian-European aircraft emerging to compete with the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning. The South Korean project to build an advanced combat aircraft alternatively offers to fund developments of the Eurofighter Typhoon or to help sustain Boeing’s waning fighter business—but there is also a strong chance that the ambitious program will collapse into yet another F-35 order.
BAE Systems has completed its purchase of the defense business of Australia’s Tenix at an estimated price of A$775 million ($740 million). The sale more than doubles BAE’s business in Australia and makes it the country’s largest defense supplier. Tenix Defense brings one of Australia’s two main naval shipyards into BAE’s portfolio. The Australian government raised no objection to the transfer of the locally owned arms-making operation to BAE Systems. Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon went as far as congratulating BAE on the deal.
Qantas regional unit QantasLink will retire its six Dash 8-100 aircraft as part of a cost-cutting exercise that will also see a withdrawal of services linking Melbourne with secondary Australian cities Newcastle and Wollongong. Newcastle was already well served by budget airlines with Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s, posing a great challenge to Qantas’s full-service turboprop operation, although one of those no-frills carriers, Singapore’s Tiger Airways, will be pulling out of the Newcastle-Melbourne market.
