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.
A Shanghai court has ordered 15 pilots who quit working for a state airline to pay their former employer 2.1 million yuan ($322,000) each in compensation for the cost of their training. The state airline, whose name has not been revealed, failed in its attempt to recover a further 7.55 million yuan from each pilot as compensation for the resources they used in accumulating experience—those resources presumably being the aircraft and facilities that the airline was concurrently employing to earn money from passengers.
In the May 11 story headlined “Australia Cuts Defense As U.S. Dollar Makes Imports Cheaper,” the amount saved in the defense budget over four years should have been stated as AU$5.3 billion ($5.7 billion). In addition to cuts of AU$4.3 billion, AU$1 billion of currency savings are automatically taken by the Treasury.
The timing looked perfect in 2002, when Australia decided it would buy the Lockheed Martin F-35. The stealth fighter would be operational with the U.S. Air Force by 2011, before it began taking over the roles of Australia's F-111 strike bombers and F/A-18A/B Hornet fighters.
