Readers of a certain age may remember a comic book called Blackhawk: a mercenary squadron of international fighter pilots sells their services to foreign bidders, sometimes governments, sometimes revolutionaries.
Occasionally, life imitates comics.
There have been news reports recently about China recruiting Western pilots. These emanate from a new bulletin warning about this trend. This bulletin, issued by the so-called Five Eyes Alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States), is vague about motives, scale and actors.
China’s motive, the Five Eyes say, is “to train [People’s Liberation Army] Air Force and Navy aviators. The PLA wants the skills and expertise of these individuals to make its own military air operations more capable while gaining insight into Western air tactics, techniques, and procedures.”
Really?
This is vague to the point of being evasive. The first part of the purported motive—to train Chinese pilots—seems to make no sense in terms of flying. Chinese pilots will be the experts in flying their own aircraft.
The second part, “gaining insight into tactics, techniques and procedures,” sounds like classroom work. Such content is already available from Western military manuals and publications. China could train itself using this literature and undoubtedly is doing so.
The implied scale is also baffling. CNN reports: “Last October, the UK Ministry of Defense said it believed up to 30 former British military pilots were providing training in China and that many others have been approached, including pilots who were still serving.”
How many pilots does China need? A U.S. “Air Force official told Military.com at an Air and Space Forces Association conference in Maryland that ‘hundreds’ of service members and allies are likely being targeted by the [communist] effort.”
For flight training, there are only 600 or so modern fighters in China’s inventory. Is aviator training going to be one-on-one for each Chinese pilot?
There is the possibility of special training, nonflight training, absorbing some of these “hundreds” of U.S. recruits. Some stories mention aircraft carrier landing and takeoff. Is there also a great demand for search and rescue? Jet engine maintenance? Airstrip construction? Parachute packing?
But wait, it’s aviators the recruiters want.
One plausible reason to recruit, even in these numbers, would be to debrief the aviators. How would you evade detection? How was your unit organized? How exactly does your support organization support you? What are the special features and capabilities of your aircraft?
It’s classified
All this crosses into classified territory.
Assuming that recruiters are selecting pilots with different aircraft in their backgrounds and that they enlist them from different countries, the numbers could reasonably add up.
To know more, we would need to see the recruiting advertisements, especially duration of contracts. A debrief would last days at most. It might be that the recruiters are hiring under the pretext of flight training when the real purpose is debriefing with a switcheroo happening later. Or perhaps it’s a package including flight training that involves debriefs.
If the Five Eyes know what is happening, they are not saying. Perhaps they are protecting the inevitable “sources and methods.”
Some stories are naming the names left out of the bulletin: “U.S. officials have responded by putting commercial restrictions on several companies, namely the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA), Beijing China Aviation Technology Co. (BCAT), Stratos and others. There have also been additional legal and regulation updates outlawing former military members from engaging in employment with China after they leave the ranks.”
This TFASA has a lot to say about the U.S. restrictions and the Five Eyes bulletin:
The United States’ efforts to impair TFASA’s business operations have been ongoing since TFASA’s refusal to share information on its clients with the US Department of State, and other US government agencies, when approached and offered inducements to do so in 2013….
TFASA notes that over the past ten years almost 70% of Chinese pilot cadets who received training internationally do so via the United States (over the period 2010-2021 the US trained and qualified over 14,000 Chinese pilots); all Chinese pilot cadets trained by TFASA are drawn from, and return to, exactly the same talent pool as those trained by the United States….
TFASA has never deliberately sought to headhunt serving military personnel from NATO countries. The majority of its employees join the company from other civilian contractors.
If 70% of Chinese pilots training abroad are schooled in the U.S. and their numbers approach 14,000, over 11 years, then it is logical to conclude that hundreds of aviators may be needed for refresher training in China.
But why?
So we approach a solution to the bulletin’s ambiguities.
The question for the Five Eyes and the U.S. in particular is why on earth have we been training Chinese military pilots to begin with? □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
