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.
Reviewing the Asia-Pacific civil aerospace industry this week, we see the great range of challenges facing managers outside of the world's main aircraft building centers in the Americas and Europe. India's private aerospace industry, only 12 years old, is grappling with the usual problems of a startup in finding skilled people and volume contracts—although local company Dynamatic is succeeding in high-rate production for Airbus while other Indian companies are carving niches in engineering services.
The aerospace unit of Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI) is aiming to cut costs by almost half, in an intensive, eight-year effort that began in fiscal 2008. The effort has two sides. One is to reduce labor expenditure by 30% by cutting non-value time, minutes that employees spend without working on the product—for example, by walking to fetch tools. Then the remaining labor is to be cut by a further 30% by reducing value time, meaning that less work must be applied directly in creating a component, such as a Boeing 777 or 787 center wingbox.
