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.
Japan’s ATD-X Shinshin stealth technology demonstrator will fly in 2011 and will look much like a Lockheed Martin F-22 scaled to the size of a Saab Gripen, but with a more conventional planform than the U.S. fighter’s. The aircraft’s electronics and IHI Corp. XF5-1 engines are to be completed by 2009, ready for final assembly of the aircraft in 2010.
Japan Airlines, starting Dec. 20, will put its code on twice-weekly China Eastern flights between Tokyo and Nanjing, a city of more than 6 million people that serves as the capital of China’s Jiangsu province. The two carriers have code shared since 2002.
The South Korean air force says it has a "realistic plan" to introduce fifth-generation fighters in the middle of the next decade under a program called F-XX. The strategy is included in the Defense Reform Plan 2020. The priority will be procurement in the F-15K class until neighboring countries begin acquiring fifth-generation fighters, Chief of Staff Kim Eun-ki said. He stresseed that F-XX will be pursued regardless of the outcome of KFX, the program to develop a home-grown stealth fighter.
