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.
KOREAN BUY: The South Korean military will seek approval to buy 20 maritime aircraft to supplement 16 Lockheed Martin P-3Cs in dealing with the threat of North Korean submarines, local media reports. The requirement, set by the joint chiefs of staff, will cost an estimated 1 trillion won ($900 million), says Yonhap news agency, quoting an unnamed military source. The candidate aircraft are the Boeing P-8 Poseidon, Airbus Military C-295MPA and Lockheed Martin SC-130J, a proposed maritime version of the Hercules airlifter.
The Avic MA700 turboprop, now due to go into service in 2018, is the aircraft program that more than a few people in China's aircraft industry believe should have launched early last decade. At that time, Avic had built the Antonov An-24 turboprop as the Y-7 and had updated it in partnership with Western suppliers to create the MA60. The next move, so the theory goes, should have been a new turboprop, also built with Western suppliers. “But everyone was impatient,” says a Chinese industry official. “We wanted to make a jet.”
