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.
If China needs it, China wants to make it. That rule applies to nuclear power plants, high-speed trains, aero engines, commercial aircraft and just about any other product. Now the rule applies to business jets, too. And as heavy Chinese demand for such aircraft becomes ever more likely, the country's fighter builder, Avic Aviation Techniques (AAT), is aiming at catapulting itself into the industry by building two bizjets with a foreign partner—one to a current design and one newly developed.
If China needs it, China wants to make it. That rule applies to nuclear power plants, high-speed trains, aero-engines and commercial aircraft. Now the rule applies to business jets, too. As heavy Chinese demand for such aircraft becomes ever more likely, the country’s fighter builder, Avic Aviation Techniques (AAT), is aiming at catapulting itself into the industry by building two bizjets with a foreign partner—one based current design and one to be newly developed.
How does a maker of military aircraft systems, with roots in a command economy, transform itself into a profit-oriented business that can win the trust of the world's airlines? With a little help from its friends. Avic Electromechanical Systems, part of the Avic conglomerate, aims to become part of the global civil aviation supply chain. But it has a serious problem in corporate culture, partly because of its defense heritage.
