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 will build complete outer wings for Airbus A320-family aircraft from the end of this year, following the conclusion of an agreement between Airbus and Xi’an Aircraft Industry Co. The deal, the second between Airbus and a Chinese manufacturer this month, will avoid the cost of sending Xi’an-built outer wing boxes to Britain for completion and then back to China’s A320 family final assembly plant now operating at Tianjin.
BEIJING—The Australian Transport Safety Bureau added a second, similar incident to its investigation of the Oct. 7, 2008, uncommanded nose-down pitch event involving a Qantas Airbus A330-300. The safety panel expects to issue a preliminary report this month. Both incidents involved faults with air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs), and both occurred off the West Coast of Australia, where the U.S. and Australian navies operate a low-frequency radio communications station.
China’s newly formed helicopter company will be based in Tianjin, where the city government will take 31 percent of the capital in a first step toward separating the rotary-wing business from national aircraft-making conglomerate Avic. Tianjin also will host a new production line with which the company will build light civilian helicopters, part of a range of initiatives that are turning the city, a big port close to Beijing, into a globally important aerospace center.
