Former CIA Base Turning Into Key Chinese Air Force Facility in Laos

China’s first dedicated overseas military aviation facility has opened at a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) airfield in Laos. The China-Laos Joint Support and Training Center and the China-Laos Friendship Aviation Academy began operating at Ban Keun Airport on September 29, 2026, marking a significant expansion of China’s military cooperation with its landlocked neighbour. The site, approximately 50 kilometres north of the Laotian capital Vientiane, was previously used by Air America, a covertly CIA-owned airline that supported U.S.-backed forces during the Cold War era conflict in Indochina. The new facility is officially intended to train Laotian military pilots, but its location, infrastructure and reported deployment of Chinese-origin aircraft have drawn attention to its potential wider strategic significance.

U.S. forces conducted extensive covert operations in Laos alongside their military campaign in neighbouring Vietnam. Although Laos was formally neutral, it became a major theatre of the wider conflict, with the CIA having organised and supported local forces, including Hmong fighters, while Air America provided transportation, resupply, and other services essential to sustaining operations in difficult terrain. The agency’s own historical account describes its air operations in Laos between 1955 and 1974 as among the largest paramilitary operations it had undertaken. Air America was central to the CIA’s ability to sustain its operations in the country, and although having presented itself as a civilian airline, it was secretly owned by the agency and played the key role in efforts to build paramilitary forces abroad. 

Ban Keun was known as Lima Site 44 and served as one of the airfields used by Air America during the conflict. The site was used to support American-backed operations, with Air America helicopters transporting Hmong troops and supplies to other locations. The facility was a key departure point for helicopter operations from as early as 1968, and formed part of a broader network of airstrips that allowed American personnel and their local partners to move troops and supplies across Laos’s mountainous landscape, often beyond the reach of conventional road infrastructure. The possibility of basing in Laos has been raised at a time when China has continued to expand the leads of its air force in both the ranges of its fighters, and in the availability of modern tanker support for aerial refuelling. The J-20 is currently assessed to the world’s longest ranged fighter type, with over double the combat radii of its U.S. rivals. Its successor being developed under the J-XX program is estimated to have a range approaching twice as long as the J-20’s.