Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

China Aviation Industry I (AVIC I) Commercial Aircraft Co. (ACAC) is to supply Irish-American aircraft lessor GE Commercial Aviation Services (GECAS) with up to 25 General Electric CF34-powered ARJ21-700ER regional jets starting in 2013 under a contract signed today at the China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai. The agreement, China’s biggest in both unit numbers and value, is worth some five billion Chinese yuan (about $730 million). 
ACAC claims to hold “commitments” for a total of 206 of the twinjets, which can be configured to carry from 70 to 95 passengers. Originally scheduled to fly last March, the 1,390-nm ARJ21 is now expected to take off for the first time this month. Certification had been previously scheduled for next month, though this now seems very unlikely. 
GECAS signed the contract with Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), a state-owned company in which AVIC I is a major shareholder, along with four other companies. Comac plans to develop larger airliners that could carry more than 150 passengers, misleadingly dubbed "jumbo" designs by Chinese officials.

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