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.
Australia expects to take delivery in November of the first two of six Boeing Wedgetails it has ordered, but the 737-based airborne warning and control aircraft will not yet, by then, deliver full operational capability. In fact, the Wedgetails may never fully meet the contract specification. The Royal Australian Air Force says it hopes to achieve 95 percent of that performance, although it does not say how that will be measured.
Beijing will get four daily scheduled flights from Tokyo’s downtown airport, Haneda, beginning Oct. 25. The flights, to be shared equally between Chinese and Japanese carriers, follow a 2007 agreement under which services are flown between Haneda and Shanghai Hongqiao Airport. Haneda also is already connected to Hong Kong and to Seoul’s downtown airport, Gimpo.
China Eastern Airlines will receive yet more capital, this time 7 billion yuan (US$1 billion), as part of the deal under which it is taking over Shanghai Airlines. The companies say the takeover will be executed through a share swap that will take four or five months to complete. A sale of 7 million yuan in new shares in Shanghai and Hong Kong will bolster China Eastern’s balance sheet, which analysts estimate to be insolvent.
