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.
A large aircraft part has dropped on to a runway at Jakarta’s main airport but, with the Indonesian government taking a stern view of airline safety standards, no airline is admitting that it has lost such a piece. Local media quote an official as saying the part, described as a three-meter ring-exhaust engine cap, comes from a McDonnell Douglas MD-90 operated by Batavia Air, Lion Air or Mandala Airlines — although only Lion lists MD-90s as part of its fleet.
Singaporean budget carriers Tiger Airways and Jetstar Asia have each won the right to operate a single daily service between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur from February as part of an agreement between the city-state and Malaysia to liberalize the market. Malaysia has said its local budget carrier, AirAsia, will get rights to two daily flights. The route, one of the busiest in Asia, has been run as a joint monopoly by Malaysian Air System and Singapore Airlines with 13 daily services.
Malaysia’s AirAsia is staking out the densely populated Southeast Asia as its medium-term operating territory, rejecting lucrative China as too problematic, even for the long term. The highly profitable no-frills carrier, which boasts the world’s lowest operating costs, will become the largest user of Airbus A320s following an order for 25 of the type concluded on Dec. 5.
