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 appears to be lifting its six-year ban on new private airlines, provisionally approving the establishment of a carrier in the southwestern province of Yunnan that will have no direct government links.
Just two decades ago, on May 2, 1993, Hainan Airlines began operating from its tropical island home, Hainan, in the South China Sea. Within seven years, a holding company, HNA Group, had been set up above it. Affiliated airlines followed, along with businesses in corporate aviation, aircraft maintenance, airports, real estate, hotels, shipping, finance and much else.
A restructuring plan is bringing HNA Group’s Chinese passenger airlines under the control of the biggest and first of them—Hainan Airlines—which in turn is setting out to coordinate operations, align service levels and, in the case of two of the group’s carriers, try out low-cost operations.
