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.
At some point, mainland China will need more than three international hub airports. Funneling the international traffic of a country of 1.3 billion people through Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will not make sense forever, and even now the geographical distribution of the three is awkward. The hubs, each the base of one of China's three biggest airlines, are on the eastern and southern periphery of China's main population zone, so the country lacks a central or western gateway.
The coming generation of 90-seat turboprops will be more powerful than the aircraft now garnering the most orders, the ATR 72. But some of the intending manufacturers are pushing more than others for high power, and therefore high speed and fast climb—at the cost of fuel efficiency. After what appears to have been a long internal debate, Avic wants a low power loading—and therefore high power: 5,000 kw (6,700 shp) from each engine—so the MA700 does not unduly interfere with jet operations at major airports.
