What UK fighter pilots did and didn’t teach China’s PLA

A clutch of retired British pilots have been banned from re-entering the United Kingdom’s defense sector after they were found to have trained the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in China two years ago.

The pilots were among those from the United States, Europe, South Africa and South America who served in a flight training school in Guyuan, Ningxia, China, according to the UK-based Livingston Aerospace Ltd, which was sanctioned by the US in July this year. 

In an exclusive interview with Asia Times, a Livingston Aerospace spokesperson who requested anonymity sought to set the record straight on the company’s controversial work in China.

“The work has always been for TFASA (Test Flying Academy of South Africa),” the spokesperson said. “I would describe it as business development and project management of test flying-related matters in and for China.”

“The biggest thing that took up most of the time was establishing a test pilot school in China, which was a big undertaking, and it was all going very well until Covid struck,” he said. “The school was in a couple of locations based around the Guyuan test base, not far from Xi’an. We had about 10 instructors and 100 students go through.”

He said the students were in their late 20s and early 30s and had all been flying for some time. He said some students were very good while the remaining were just average. 

“The school is all about teaching them how to be an effective test pilot,” he said. “What they go on to do is their test pilot job. I’ve got no idea where they went. It’s not part of our knowledge.”

He said the 15-month-long flight testing course included a hundred hours of flying 40 different types of airplanes, plus academics, communicating and report writing. He said test pilots play a vital role in the safety and certification of any airplane.

He said, during that time, Livingston Aerospace was aware that its flight test techniques would be used by the PLA. But he said flight testing is a completely different matter from what TFASA was engaged in – the training of operational military pilots with techniques, tactics and procedures.

“Nobody was teaching anything that would jeopardize the interests of our friends and colleagues who stayed in the Royal Air Force,” he stressed. “We’re not giving away secrets. There’s nothing that was being taught that’s not available online anyway.”

“The stuff that is important is the technical frequencies and transmitted powers and all that sort of stuff. Even if we as a pilot knew that, it’s of very little value, unless you have the engineering background to put it into practice.”

However, the UK and US governments held different views as they accused TFASA, Livingston Aerospace and 18 other companies of having provided training to Chinese military pilots using Western and NATO sources. 

The sanctions

The incident was first made publicly known in October 2022 when the UK’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) said up to 30 former UK military pilots had gone to train members of China’s PLA aircrew. 

A MoD spokesperson said the training ​and the recruiting of pilots did not breach any current UK law but officials in the UK and other countries were trying to deter the activity.

In June 2023, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) added 16 companies to its Entity List and said that these firms had trained PLA pilots. 

The sanctioned outfits include TFASA, Frontier Services Group, AVIC International Flight Training Academy (AIFA) and Chinese Flight Test Establishment (also known as the Shaanxi-based AVIC Flight Test Center). 

In July this year, four more companies, including Livingston Aerospace, which is owned by former British military pilot Craig Penrice, were sanctioned because of their links to TFASA. 

According to BAE Systems’ website, Penrice flew the company’s advanced military trainer, namely Hawk, as well as the F-15 for the US Air Force, and did his test pilot training with the US Navy in the 1980s.

He then began to work on the development of the Eurofighter Typhoon at BAE Systems. In 1996, he was the first RAF pilot to fly the fighter, which is manufactured by a consortium of Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo, and remains the world’s most advanced swing-role combat aircraft as of now. 

According to his LinkedIn account, Penrice worked as a RAF pilot from 1980-1998, an export advisor of the UK Ministry of Defense from 2005-2007 and an aircrew operational adviser of BAE Systems from 1998-2013. He founded Livingston Aerospace in 2013.

Livingston Aerospace’s spokesperson said the company had been discussing with its Chinese counterparts about setting up a flight testing school in China since 2014. He said the company signed a five-year service contract with TFASA in 2019 before the school opened in the same year. 

“The school in China trained people to be test pilots. They went off and did some practical test flying, and then some of them came back. We taught them to be teachers,” the spokesperson said.

He said after the pandemic broke out in 2020, Livingston had failed to recruit people due to some “horrible” quarantine rules in China, resulting in the termination of the contract in early 2022. 

“It was those ones that were good enough to be the teachers that took over the school when we finally terminated the contract,” he said. “We’ve given them enough experience and training that they were able to start training their own people, which was always the aim of the contract.”

He said Livingston had then been receiving a small sum of money for providing the school with some “documentation that needed to be completed” until its UK business bank account was frozen in April 2024. He said the company can’t function now and is being liquidated. 

Attractive fees 

The UK’s MoD said in October 2022 that some British pilots who trained the PLA-Air Force were paid up to £237,911 ($270,000) a year.

“Anyone found to be acting against the UK’s interests by training our competitors’ militaries can now expect to be pursued and brought to justice,”  then UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said in September 2023, citing the newly-established National Security Act. 

Livingston’s spokesperson said the number of the accused UK pilots was “hugely exaggerated” and should be less than 10. 

He said the company had been warned by the security services in the UK last year that the new Act would put it “in jeopardy of breaking the law” if it continued its activity in China. 

Commenting on the pilots’ annual salaries of up to £237,911, he said, “The salaries that these guys were getting paid were not too different from what somebody gets paid to go and fly in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Kuwait, all of which have got Typhoon airplanes.”

“These are not nice places to go and work. So you have to pay people for the disturbance and hardship and all the rest of it,” he said. “And for us or TFASA to attract people, you had to pay similar or better salaries.”

He said the public may not be happy about what these UK pilots have done in China, but in fact, these pilots have already faced the consequences.

“They can’t get any meaningful employment in the UK. They can’t rejoin the Air Force. They can’t join any defense company. They’ve been banned from a lot of places,” he said, adding that he would not travel to the US as Washington’s investigation of TFASA is probably still ongoing. 

Intelligence source

On June 5 this year, TFASA said in a statement that it decided to end the employment of all UK nationals following legal changes in the UK. It said it had never deliberately sought to headhunt serving military personnel from NATO countries.

“TFASA seemed to be the focus of all this activity. It’s not Livingston Aerospace…It’s TFASA that the US authorities want to thwart,” said Livingston Aerospace’s spokesperson. 

“The test pilot school is a distraction in this argument. What upsets people in the UK and the US is the fact that people were training Chinese Air Force and Army and Navy pilots,” he said. “There were a load of other British citizens who were involved in the more dubious part, which was training the Chinese military operationally.”

He added that all the involved pilots could actually feed their intelligence back to their home nations as they did a vitally detailed insight into China’s aviation capabilities.

“What could be a better source of intelligence than having your citizens flying with ‘your adversary’? What better insight can you get to their capabilities than having your pilots flying in their squadrons?” he asked. “And what’s happened now is you’ve shot all that down and lost that vital intelligence link.”

However, he would not confirm whether any pilot has passed intelligence to the UK and US governments. 

Yong Jian is a contributor to the Asia Times. He is a Chinese journalist who specializes in Chinese technology, economy and politics. 

Read: US sanctions firms for training PLA aircrew in S Africa