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 is advancing its space capabilities by developing staged combustion, an engine technology that is likely to offer greater performance for the Long March 6 and 7, two of a family of launchers that the country will field around the middle of the decade. The smaller of the two, the Long March 6, may be the first to go into service, beating the flagship third member of the family, the Long March 5 heavy launcher.
The plant building the CALT Long March 5 has proved its technology for precise assembly of large-diameter sections with friction-stir welding, a key achievement as the program moves toward a 2014 first flight. The 211th Factory at the Tianjin industrial base used that and other advanced manufacturing technologies in building an engineering sample of a short section of the Long March 5’s second stage, a liquid-hydrogen tank, says national space contractor CASC.
China’s Minsheng Financial Leasing is in talks to acquire 10-15 business jets, and has plans to obtain 100 by 2014. The company, set up to exploit what its owners rightly expected to be rapid growth in Chinese business aviation, has ordered 17 aircraft since signing its first purchase contract in April 2008, says the firm’s aviation and legal consultant, David Tang.
