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.
The internal target for certification of Comac’s 90-seat ARJ21 regional jet has been delayed again, to 2014 from the previously scheduled mid-2013, says a program official. Development therefore is now likely to last 12 years, with six years of flight testing. A key reason for the latest delay is slow progress in flight testing. Engineers also are attending to avionics bugs and modifying the landing gear, one of many issues arising from changes elsewhere in the design.
The ARJ21 program was always supposed be a learning experience. If people learn when things go wrong, then Comac must be learning a lot, and it is giving itself more time for its lessons.
