A video which featured on Twitter's Chinese-speaking service on 23 April shows a foreigner in uniform, speaking English with a slight French accent, stretched out on the grass alongside a pilot who presents himself as an officer of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA). The foreigner's pilot ID is Bronx. The two men are understood to have ejected from a JL-10 training aircraft in the province of Anhui. According to our sources, at least three former French fighter pilots, including at least one who had flown Dassault-built Rafale, have already taken part in flight training sessions for the Chinese army. American and Australian pilots have also been approached.
Such operations enable China's PLA, which is looking to obtain skills and information from the Western armed forces, to learn the operating methods and rules of engagement in the French air force. It enables it, too, to observe the reflexes and combat practices of the pilots, all of which could be useful information in a conflict situation.
Test Flight Academy of South Africa
Intelligence Online understands that some of these secret training sessions are provided by the Test Flight Academy of South Africa (TFASA). It recruits former Western air force pilots by offering them attractive salaries and then sends them to China. According to our sources, some pilots have been offered up to $30,000 per month.
TFASA has been providing training for Chinese commercial pilots for more than 10 years in partnership with the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a state-controlled group which builds aircraft in collaboration with the two aircraft construction market leaders, Boeing and Airbus Group, as well as helicopters and fighter aircraft - like the PLA's JL-10. TFASA operates in a joint venture with aviation giant AVIC-International Flight Training Academy (AIFA), which trains Chinese and African commercial airline pilots. The South African company has links with the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) and provides civil aviation training in the province of Liaoning. It also trains pilots to fly aircraft produced by AVIC subsidiary, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), which is on the way to becoming the world's third biggest aircraft manufacturer.
In the helicopter field, TFASA trains pilots to fly the Z-10 attack helicopter produced by the Changhe Aircraft Industries Group (CAIG) and the China Helicopter Research and Development Institute, and the Z-8 troop transporter manufactured by the Harbin Aircraft Manufacturing Co (HAMC).
Complicated past
TFASA has a complicated past. It was founded in 1998 as a public body known as the National Test Pilot School (NTPS) however it had to close in 2003. It claims this was due to American pressure over its already existing links with China. That same year, however, it returned as TFASA, a privately owned company but with backing from the South African government. It was brought back to life by new chairman, Jean Rossouw, a former South African Air Force (SAAF) pilot who had become chief training flight engineer at Advanced Technologies and Engineering (ATE), the legendary Franco-South African integrator set up by French pilot Henri de Waubert. The latter, who died in the second quarter of 2020, made his name by winning some of the most sensitive contracts of the 1980s, bringing in French pilots to operate the Iraqi air forces' Mirage aircraft during the Iran-Iraq war and using Western avionics to modernise the Russian aircraft operated by such African countries as Algeria, Libya and Chad. ATE was finally taken over in 2013 by South African defence industry magnate Ivor Ichikowitz (IO, 12/12/12).
In South Africa, TFASA has vast air training areas in the skies over the Cape of Good Hope and inland over the town of Oudtshoorn in Western Cape Province. For its exercises in South Africa, it hires Dassault Mirage F1s and Saab Cheetahs no longer used by the South African air force. Most of South Africa's F1s were bought by Ichikowitz's Paramount group after 2006. The company boasts that it can also provide pilots who have flown in Eurofighters, produced by BAE Systems, Airbus Group and Leonardo, SAAB-built Gripens and BAE Tornados.
Counter Intelligence at work, or not
Western pilots ready to work for TFASA are not well regarded by their countries' intelligence services. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which is already working hard to counter the threat posed by Chinese interference, is working with the armed forces to deprive them of their security clearance and take legal action against them.
As Intelligence Online (IO, 04/09/19) reported, the United States was alerted to the risk in 2019 and, according to our sources, no US pilot has worked with TFASA. In France, the military counter-espionage service, the Direction du Renseignement et de la Sécurité de la Défense (DRSD), would not confirm that it knew of any French pilots operating in China.
