Why are Chinese citizens who may end up flying for the People’s Republic of China receiving flight training in the United States?
Probably for the same reason that U.S. academics, with the knowledge and approval of U.S. university administrators, collaborate with Chinese academics to produce research that would be of use to the People’s Liberation Army or CCP-employed hackers. The point of flight training is to train pilots. The point of scholarly collaborations is to come up with findings. Money is also involved. Tuition, subsidies.
If U.S.-trained Chinese pilots and U.S.-enhanced Chinese military technology end up being used against the United States—but these are considerations that often seem far off the radar screen.
Options for the CCP
In a recent letter to the Transportation Security Administration, Senator Jim Banks writes that although many of the Chinese students trained to be pilots here “will go on to civilian and not military careers, the Chinese Communist Party, through its Military-Civil Fusion strategy, has foreclosed our ability to view this training with the benefit of a doubt. The more Chinese citizens there are with aviation training, the more options the Chinese military has to recruit pilots and instructors for its malign purposes” (National Review, March 13, 2026).
Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security, of which the TSA is a part, has been authorized by Congress to assess the potential security risk posed by foreign nationals who apply for flight training in the United States.
Banks says that the standards for assessing risk need to be tougher. He asks the TSA to “update the Flight Training Security Program to preclude individuals from foreign adversary nations, such as China, from attending flight training schools in the United States. We must ensure that American flight training programs serve American interests—not Xi Jinping’s dreams.”
The full text of Banks’s letter to the TSA does not yet appear to be archived online.
Also see:
House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party: “Moolenaar Demands the National Science Foundation Suspend Award Funding for Texas A&M and the University of Washington”
From Congressman Moolenaar’s letter: “NSF’s SECURE initiative is a five-year, $67 million program. The program includes awards of $50 million to the University of Washington (UW) and $17 million to Texas A&M University (TAMU)…. The program is intended to develop tools, data infrastructure, and analytic capabilities for assessing research-security risks. Faculty from UW and TAMU—the same institutions now charged with designing systems and processes to protect taxpayer-funded research—have been collaborating with People’s Republic of China defense research and industrial base entities, many of which are on various U.S. government national security entity lists.”
