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.
The coming generation of 90-seat turboprops will be more powerful than the aircraft now garnering the most orders, the ATR 72. But some of the intending manufacturers are pushing more than others for high power, and therefore high speed and fast climb—at the cost of fuel efficiency. After what appears to have been a long internal debate, Avic wants a low power loading—and therefore high power: 5,000 kw (6,700 shp) from each engine—so the MA700 does not unduly interfere with jet operations at major airports.
Five decades after jets wiped out large Western propeller airliners, the turboprop is pushing back. Until the arrival of the much-heralded propfan, it will not recover the trunkline ground it occupied until the 1960s, but pressure is building to expand the turboprop in the role that it has held since then as a fuel-efficient, short-haul passenger aircraft.
