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.
Zhuhai, China—The CALT Long March 7 medium-heavy space launcher will go into production in 2014, according to current plans, completing a new family of Chinese rockets with new fuels and engines. The Chinese rocket, sized between the Long March 5 and 6, will offer up to 720 tons (1,590 lb.) of liftoff thrust from six engines fed by liquid oxygen and kerosene.
The latest upgrade of the CFM56 engine is showing more than the promised 1% improvement in fuel consumption during ground tests. But manufacturer CFM International will not go as far as to say that the engine, the CFM56-7BE, will deliver more than 1% in service because it must await confirmation in flight tests. “I don’t want to be wrong when Boeing flies it on a 737,” says Chaker Chakrour, executive VP. Flight test results sometimes fail to confirm ground test results.
A Shanghai-based joint-venture company will gradually take over the civil avionics businesses of General Electric and Avic. Establishment of the joint company can now go ahead, following the signing of an agreement of the Shanghai municipal and Shandong provincial governments to invest in the Chinese side. “This will be the main commercial avionics business of Avic and General Electric,” Avic VP Zhang Xinguo told Aviation Week after the signing ceremony at Airshow China in Zhuhai, Guangdong.
