Chinese student admits photographing US military jets

A University of Glasgow student has pleaded guilty in the United States to taking unauthorised photographs of military aircraft at a major air base, and faces up to a year in prison, the UK Defence Journal understands.

Tianrui Liang, a 21-year-old Chinese national in the third year of an aeronautical engineering degree at Glasgow, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on 7 April 2026, as he prepared to fly home to Scotland via Frankfurt. He had photographed aircraft at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, the headquarters of US Strategic Command and one of the most sensitive military sites in the United States.

According to court filings and US reporting, Liang entered the United States on a tourist visa, having flown from the UK to Vancouver on 26 March to meet a friend studying at Columbia University in New York. The pair drove across the border at Seattle on 28 March and travelled to Montana, after which the friend returned to New York and Liang continued alone. He first visited Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, hoping to photograph B-1B Lancer bombers, and on finding none used a public plane-spotting website to redirect to Offutt.

At Offutt, prosecutors say, Liang photographed a Boeing RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft and a Boeing E-4B, the militarised Boeing 747 known as the “Nightwatch” or “Doomsday plane” for its role as a survivable airborne command post. The photographs were said to have been taken from a public roadway, but Liang was reported to the authorities and subsequently confronted by the FBI in Nebraska. He then drove to New York, where agents who had obtained an arrest warrant detained him at the airport.

Liang was charged under Title 18, Section 795 of the United States Code, which makes it unlawful to photograph or sketch vital military installations or equipment without permission from the commanding officer. The offence is a Class A misdemeanour. He pleaded guilty on 7 May 2026 at a federal court in the Eastern District of New York, and faces up to a year in prison and a significant fine.

The magistrate judge, Michael D. Nelson, ordered that Liang remain in federal custody pending sentencing, citing a lack of information about him, his family, his foreign ties and his travel plans. The court heard that when he was arrested he was carrying two laptops and an external hard drive, and that a drone he had used in Nebraska had been used more than he initially told investigators. His lawyer described him as an avid aviation photographer who had, since 2020, been obsessively engaged in the hobby of plane-spotting, with more photographs taken in China than in any other country.

The US attorney’s office issued a warning after the guilty plea. “Any individual who unlawfully attempts to acquire sensitive information about military aircraft will be held maximally accountable under federal law,” prosecutor Lesley Woods said.

Section 795 is one of a number of laws restricting photography of defence sites but in practice, aviation enthusiasts who photograph military aircraft from public ground are rarely pursued under such laws, and the case is unusual both in resulting in a prosecution and in the sensitivity of the base involved. Offutt is home to the aircraft that would direct American forces in a nuclear conflict, including the E-4B fleet, which is among the reasons the site is treated as particularly sensitive.