While America grapples with the border crisis brought to us by former President Joe Biden’s administration, the Chinese Communist Party is quietly turning our own flight schools into their personal training grounds for military pilots. 

According to investigative journalist Peter Schweizer’s new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon, the Chinese Communist Party is exploiting U.S. flight schools to train thousands of potential military pilots each year. This operation, conducted under the guise of civilian education, is bolstering Beijing’s air power while American taxpayers foot the bill for the infrastructure.

Schweizer details that China faces a severe pilot shortage, needing around 5,000 cadets annually to support both its military and civilian aviation sectors. However, due to the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) tight grip on domestic airspace, Beijing can only train about 1,200 pilots at home each year. To bridge this gap, the CCP has quietly established a network to send 3,000 cadets to the United States annually, where they pose as civilian students and receive training at least 16 flight schools operating out of taxpayer-funded airports. These schools often fail to disclose the cadets’ ties to foreign militaries, allowing the program to fly under the radar.  

The epicenter of this activity includes locations in California and Arizona. In Atwater, California, the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics, which enrolls mostly Chinese nationals, collaborates directly with the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) to train future military pilots.

The school’s owner, John Yoon, has extensive business ties to China, including plans for a cargo facility at Castle Airport, funded in part by Chinese EB-5 investments. As Sierra’s vice president, Brian Johnson boasted in a 2013 interview, the academy’s connections to Chinese government institutions and airlines position it perfectly for these programs.

Cliff Maloney, CEO of Citizens Alliance and a vocal advocate for border security, recently addressed this issue on Newsmax’s “Frontline” with Carl Higbie, framing it as part of a larger CCP infiltration strategy. 

“There are about 10,000 spies estimated to be just in the Washington DC area. When you look at this, it is a CCP operation trying to come in and use our folks to train their pilots. Of course, they’re having success because we’ve had an open border for the past four years, right? So, the Trump administration has a tough task here, but we’ve got to push back on the insanity. We’ve got to keep tightening the border, and we have to monitor who we’re helping out and what that means for our military.”

Schweizer warns that the U.S. is “feeding a pipeline of Chinese pilots, some of whom may one day face American forces in the skies.” Broader concerns echo this, with U.S. intelligence agencies noting China’s aggressive recruitment of Western military talent, including former fighter pilots from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and other allies, to train PLA aviators.

The CCP’s covert exploitation of American flight schools represents a stealthy threat to national security, funneling U.S. resources into bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities. As Schweizer’s revelations have exposed, it’s imperative for the U.S. to tighten oversight on foreign training programs, secure our borders, and safeguard against such infiltrations to prevent empowering potential adversaries on our own soil and at the expense of taxpayers.