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.
Boeing is supplying sheet-metal-making equipment from its factory in Melbourne, Australia, to aspiring Indian aerostructures and aircraft maker Mahindra Aerospace (DAILY, July 12). The heavy equipment was used in a fabrication shop at the Fishermens Bend factory that has been surplus because the factory, now focused on the 787 program, ceased making sheet-metal parts 18 months ago. Mahindra Aerospace will install the equipment at an aerostructures factory it plans to build at a site in India it has not yet chosen.
Mahindra Aerospace has agreed to buy a Boeing plant in Melbourne, Australia, and will move the equipment to a facility to be built in India, kick-starting a new aerostructures business there, says an industry executive familiar with the transaction. Mahindra will work with a first-tier supplier to set up the Indian plant, says the source. Boeing has a plant at Fishermen’s Bend in Melbourne, one of two under its Boeing Aerostructures Australia division. The other is at Bankstown in Sydney.
Mahindra Aerospace, aiming to become the Embraer of India, will move rapidly to build large aerostructures thanks to an agreement to buy equipment from Boeing’s Australian operation. The Indian company, a subsidiary of conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra, is catapulting itself into the industry with a range of Australian acquisitions that are accelerating its development, perhaps by a decade or more.
