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.
BEIJING — A tightly wrapped object the size and shape of a combat aircraft was hauled along Chinese highways in June, sparking speculation that the country was deliberately revealing a new twin-engine fighter from Shenyang Aircraft. Although a real fighter would not normally ride about 1,800 km (1,100 mi.) on a truck with its wings attached, a full-scale model for testing its radar cross section or another purpose might.
BEIJING — Chinese astronauts who manually docked their spacecraft with an orbital laboratory on June 24 have proven a technology crucial for the nation’s proposed space station program. Astronaut Liu Wang, helped by his two colleagues on board Shenzhou 9, took 7 min. to bring the spacecraft into contact with the laboratory, Tiangong 1, from a range of 400 meters (1,300 ft.). That was 3 min. faster than the performance of the automatic system that Shenzhou 9 had used on June 18 and Shenzhou 8 had used last year in China’s first space docking exercise.
