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.
Nothing in aviation or space in 2007 represented a greater change in the status quo than China’s ascendancy to the first rank of space powers. China had proven its mettle four years earlier by becoming only the third member of the elite club of nations capable of flying humans in space. But in 2007, it accomplished two more feats, proving to the world that it’s a space player to be reckoned with across the board.
Japan’s ATD-X Shinshin stealth technology demonstrator will fly in 2011 and will look much like a Lockheed Martin F-22 scaled to the size of a Saab Gripen, but with a more conventional planform than the U.S. fighter’s. The aircraft’s electronics and IHI Corp. XF5-1 engines are to be completed by 2009, ready for final assembly of the aircraft in 2010.
Japan Airlines, starting Dec. 20, will put its code on twice-weekly China Eastern flights between Tokyo and Nanjing, a city of more than 6 million people that serves as the capital of China’s Jiangsu province. The two carriers have code shared since 2002.
