Here’s a question that should keep Pentagon planners up at night: if American and Chinese pilots ever engage in combat, how many on both sides will have received their training at the same American flight school?
Peter Schweizer’s new book The Invisible Coup exposes one of the most absurd national security failures imaginable. China needs 5,000 new pilots every year. Their tightly controlled airspace only lets them train about 1,200 domestically. So Beijing figured out a solution—send 3,000 of them to America.
We’re literally training the pilots who might one day try to shoot down our planes.
The Pipeline
At least sixteen flight schools operating out of taxpayer-funded American airports are training Chinese cadets. Many of these future pilots enter posing as civilians, hiding their military connections. Student visas get them in with “minimal scrutiny.”
This isn’t happening in some shadowy corner of the country. It’s California. Arizona. Flight schools where most of the students are Chinese nationals, learning American techniques, studying American systems, building skills they’ll take back to serve the Chinese Communist Party.
“How this happened is a testament to Chinese ingenuity in manipulating our immigration system for subversive purposes and using our openness and generosity against us,” Schweizer writes. “It is also a tribute to American innocence, or at worst, ignorance.”
Innocence is generous. This looks a lot more like willful blindness.
Sierra Academy
One of the main training grounds is Sierra Academy of Aeronautics in Atwater, California. Most of the students there are Chinese nationals.
The school’s owner, John Yoon, has multiple companies with “extensive Chinese ties.” Sierra Academy has developed plans to create a cargo facility at Castle Airport—a former Air Force base—to fly goods directly in and out of China. They were hoping to fund it with EB-5 investor visa money from Chinese sources.
“Because Sierra Academy has been working with the Chinese government, institutions, airlines—we have all the right contacts to put this program in place,” the school’s vice president bragged in 2013.
They’re selling aviation training and U.S. residency as a package deal. Beijing gets trained pilots and a foothold in American infrastructure. The school gets paid. Everyone wins except American national security.
Documents show Sierra Academy works with Chinese colleagues involved in aeronautical manufacturing, including people embedded with military contractors and CCP talent pipelines.
The Arizona Connection
Near Phoenix, a company called Aeroguard signed a 2022 agreement to train pilots for Chinese government-controlled Cathay Pacific airline. Hundreds of cadet pilots at their Arizona campus.
Here’s the infuriating part: the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security approved it. Democratic Congressman Greg Stanton personally helped “secure and expedite” the approval.
Aeroguard thanked him in a press release for making sure “the approvals were obtained in a timely fashion.”
A sitting U.S. congressman fast-tracked approval for training Chinese pilots. That’s not oversight failure—that’s active assistance.
Locals See the Problem
Fred Warchel, a resident near Castle Airport, has been asking the obvious question: “Why train potential enemies to fly?”
“Hundreds of Chinese students are receiving initial and advanced flight training here in Merced at the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics,” he pointed out. “This means if Chinese and American pilots ever engage in combat, both may be able to say: We received our training in America at the former Castle Air Force Base.”
A former Air Force base. Training Chinese military pilots. Using American facilities, American instructors, American airspace.
The absurdity is almost too perfect.
The Bigger Picture
China has a pilot shortage. We’re solving it for them. Chinese helicopter pilots, fixed-wing pilots, thousands of them cycling through American training programs and returning home to serve the CCP’s military apparatus.
They’re exploiting our immigration system, our open society, our eagerness to take foreign money. And we’ve made it easy. Minimal scrutiny on student visas. No real verification of military ties. Flight schools happy to take the cash. Politicians happy to expedite the paperwork.
Meanwhile, China restricts American access to their airspace, their technology, their training programs. They would never allow this in reverse. They’re not stupid.
We apparently are.
The pilots being trained right now in California and Arizona might one day face American forces in the Pacific. When that happens, they’ll know exactly how we fly—because we taught them.
