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 Southern will open a service to Moscow as part of a build-up of operations at Wuhan, the large central Chinese city, where its chief rival is fellow SkyTeam alliance member China Eastern. Air China, meanwhile, is continuing its expansion at China Eastern’s main base, Shanghai, by announcing a service to Munich. The new routes are part of the Chinese airline industry’s wider push to increase international business, despite a long history of ceding most such services to foreign carriers.
BEIJING — The single-engine aircraft that Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) is proposing for the South Korean KF-X indigenous fighter program would be as effective in combat as the big twin proposed by the Agency for Defense Development (ADD), KAI says.
CHINESE TRAINERS: Avic subsidiary Hongdu Aviation Industry Group will build a 1.225 billion yuan ($198 million) factory for manufacturing parts of trainer aircraft in its home city, Nanchang. Completion of the 208,000-sq.-meter (2.2 million-sq.-ft.) plant is due in three years, local media report, citing approvals from the Nanchang government. Hongdu is one of two trainer specialists in Avic’s defense subsidiary, Avic Aviation Techniques. The other is Guizhou Aircraft. Some of the trainer parts will be made under contract, presumably for Guizhou.
