Last Fall’s news of British and American former military fighter pilots training Chinese pilots in China just got a refresh with a new Canadian probe into ex-RCAF pilots training the Chinese.
Canada’s The Globe And Mail newspaper reported that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are investigating three former Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) fighter pilots who are training military and civilian pilots in China under the auspices of the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA).
The RCMP’s probe joins UK and American investigations of ex-military fighter pilots from their respective countries training Chinese military pilots in NATO and western tactics and fighter operations which arose last year.
According to The Globe, Canadian security officials attempted to contact the former RCAF pilots in late August. Canada’s Department of National Defence says it referred the matter to the RCMP which is looking at three individuals – Paul Umrysh, Craig Sharp and David Monk in connection with training Chinese pilots in China.
The flight school they work for, TFASA is headquartered at Oudtshoorn Airfield in Western Cape region of South Africa. Aviation Week & Space Technology reported that it was formed in 2003.
Its chairman is Jean Rossouw, a former test pilot with the South African Air Force (SAAF) and a director of the China-linked Avic-International Flight Training Academy. TFASA CEO, C. Jurie van Wyngaard, is also a SAAF pilot who previously held roles at Pilatus and Saab.
TFASA has already been the subject of U.S. and UK scrutiny. In June, the U.S. government imposed export controls on TFASA and other firms it asserts are “providing training to Chinese military pilots using Western and NATO sources.”
The company reacted to the export controls in a statement explaining that they do not “affect TFASA’s day to day operations”. The statement asserted that it has operated “with the full knowledge of NATO defence and security agencies for over a decade”.
TFASA added that “over the past ten years almost 70% of Chinese pilot cadets who received training internationally do so in the United States; all Chinese pilot cadets trained by TFASA are drawn from, and return to, exactly the same talent pool as those trained in the United States.”
That may or may not be true but the training that TFASA references is commercial air transport pilot training, not the Operational Pilot & Specialist training it lists among its business sectors.
The Globe attempted to contact the Canadian pilots but instead got a response from TFASA’s spokesman who maintained that the flight training they are conducting only involves unclassified procedures and that training materials are derived either from open sources or from the clients themselves. “The training TFASA provides never includes information about NATO,” the spokesman affirmed.
Is that credible? I spoke to a highly-placed background source in the contract adversary services (ADAIR) industry who opined that at a glance, TFASA’s expertise would appear to be more in the developmental test space but also noted that its Operational Pilot & Specialist training focus would simply not allow it to steer away from NATO tactics and procedures.
“If you’re teaching someone to develop a tactic, who are the bad guys? It’s not really pure for them to say, ‘We don’t ever mention NATO or talk about NATO tactics’. There always has to a Blue Air [i.e. China] and a Red Air [NATO/U.S.].”
The source emphasized that TFASA has “no play” in the legitimate Western ADAIR industry and is not even a recognized name. The mere exercise of placing a Chinese student pilot in one cockpit with a Canadian fighter pilot trained in NATO doctrine would inevitably produce Western training and tactical insights for the student the source agrees.
Open-source information of fighter tactics is widely available, even in the flight-simulation video games popular with two generations of gamers, simulations which can offer a baseline illustration of Western fighter tactics.
However, they have limits. Games won’t generally tell a player how to defeat a specific real-world missile but tactical fast-jet students would very much want to know the answer. Are they asking their TFASA instructors? What answers might they get?
Despite the apparent conflict with Western values illustrated by the RCAF pilots’ work with TFASA, their employment and the school’s contracts with Chinese students is not strictly illegal. TFASA stresses that it operates in compliance with South African law, as well as the laws of any other country it operates in, and that it has “systems” in place to ensure that Western-trained instructors don’t divulge classified information.
According to local South African media outlet news24, TFASA was specifically created with China in mind. It used South Africa’s ties to China as well as its relationship with Western powers to position itself as an intermediary, scooping Chinese business with its ability to hire Western ex-military pilots as instructors.
But what kind of instructors are they? Would they be qualified and welcome to work with Western ADAIR firms? My source was adamant that only pilots with previous specific military adversary/aggressor experience (mostly U.S. military) are hired at most U.S. firms. At one in particular, pilot positions are filled by word of mouth, the firm does not advertise.
American firms now vet candidates for possible exposure to China-linked operations or Chinese instruction backgrounds. “I don’t think you’re going to find a connection between ADAIR in the U.S. and the kind of things that [you see] in this example,” the source asserts.
That contrasts with TFASA which an Australian pilot told Reuters actively targets Australian, British, Canadian, New Zealander and American pilots with pay packages worth more than £200,000 ($226,000) a year.
A final note worth passing on is that the Western pilots who have opted to work training Chinese pilots for firms like TFASA are not considered high level tactics experts by the commercial ADAIR industry.
“We know people who have gone elsewhere,” my source says. “We know people who go to the Middle East, to UAE
UAE
Highly trained aggressors or not, they can still offer useful insights to the Chinese, even if they strive to draw the line somewhere. The Globe asked one of the RCAF pilots under scrutiny to address speculation that the Canadians are training students on Chinese warplanes such as the Chengdu J-10 or J-11B multi-role fighters.
The pilot did not respond, and TFASA did not offer any comment.
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