New York Times bestselling author and Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer details in his new book how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “using our openness and generosity against us” by sending thousands of future military pilots posing as civilians to the United States to learn how to fly.
Schweizer’s latest exposé, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon, delves into the little-known concern of Chinese pilots being sent to the U.S. for training with “virtually no oversight” before returning and serving in their own country’s military.
“The People’s Republic of China has a pilot problem,” the investigative journalist writes in The Invisible Coup. “Beijing needs five thousand pilot cadets every year to meet the demand for both military and civilian pilots. Because the Chinese military tightly controls the country’s airspace, it can domestically produce only about 1,200 pilots a year. So, Beijing quietly erected a system to train three thousand of them a year in the United States.”
“Across the US, at least sixteen flight schools, operating out of taxpayer-funded airports, are training Chinese cadets—sometimes without disclosing their foreign military ties,” he continues. “They do so by sending future military pilots to the United States posing as civilians to learn how to fly.”
This also applies to Chinese helicopter pilots, who receive American training by the thousands after entering the country on student visas with “minimal scrutiny,” Schweizer writes.
“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. It is also a tribute to American innocence, or at worst, ignorance.”
One of the several flight schools that the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) sends future military pilots to is Sierra Academy of Aeronautics in Atwater, California — where most of the students are Chinese nationals.
Schweizer argues that this is not by mistake, but rather by design.
Sierra Academy’s owner, John Yoon, has several related companies with “extensive Chinese ties,” Schweizer reports, adding that Sierra Academy has developed plans to create a cargo facility at California’s Castle Airport to fly goods in and out of China — and were “hoping to use EB-5 money from China to do it.”
“Because Sierra Academy has been working with the Chinese government, institutions, airlines—we have all the right contacts to put this program in place,” explained Brian Johnson, Sierra’s vice president and chief flight instructor in a 2013 interview with the Merced Sun-Star.
They are “selling both aviation training and US residency—a double win for Beijing,” Schweizer points out.
Documents cited in The Invisible Coup show that Sierra Academy works with Chinese colleagues involved in aeronautical manufacturing, including those embedded with military contractors and talent pipelines to the CCP.
As a result, the U.S. is feeding a pipeline of Chinese pilots, some of whom may one day face American forces in the skies.
Locals have been pointing this out, with resident Fred Warchel asking, “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,” Warchel continued. “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 similar situation is happening near Phoenix, Arizona with a company called Aeroguard, which is also training hundreds of Chinese pilots, as Schweizer recounts in The Invisible Coup:
In 2022, the company signed an agreement to train pilots for the Chinese government-controlled Cathay Pacific airline, with plans to train “hundreds of cadet pilots” at its campus in Phoenix, Arizona. The deal was even approved by the US Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration, thanks to the work of local congressman Greg Stanton. As AeroGuard put it in a press release, “Arizona Congressman Greg Stanton, [a] member of the House Subcommittee on Aviation, assisted AeroGuard in securing and expediting the training program approval with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Representative Stanton’s support was invaluable in making sure the approvals were obtained in a timely fashion.”
Schweizer’s book includes more harrowing and alarming details on the American training of CCP pilots.
Schweizer’s The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon is published by HarperCollins and is available to purchase now.
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