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.
For years, the Civil Aviation Administration of China insisted that China had three big airlines, three big bases and therefore three intercontinental gateways. Now dogged Chengdu has managed to join their ranks.
In choosing FHI and the well-established Bell 412 for the army’s UH-X program over a Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) offer, the defense ministry has minimized spending and risk in development.
BEIJING—Air China is expanding intercontinental services beyond the 2015 plan that it unveiled at the end of last year, increasing its frequency between Beijing and New York while applying for rights to connect Chengdu with Paris, which will help cement Chengdu’s increasingly prominent status as China’s unofficial western gateway.
