The Tribune

EVERYONE in the Bahamas has – or has heard – a story about a drug plane. That’s the reason for this series of articles about accidents or intentional ditching that happened between 25 and 55 years ago. They will try to provide an overview as well as the details of each crash.

It’s long enough ago that reviving these stories should not harm people or reputations. We can tell what happened through physical artefacts and proof: the airplanes themselves. Sources include oral history, first-hand observations from finding historic aircraft in the Bahamas, a dozen recent memoir books by survivors of the trade or their family, and many news articles, social media posts, research and satellite images online. The databases of air crashes, however, barely scratches the surface of the level of activity that actual occurred, since smuggling drugs is illegal and was meant to be – and stay - secretive.

My knowledge of drug planes begins on our home island. So I’ll start with New Providence, at our family business, Cable Beach Manor, and move west, south and east.

When I was age 7, in the mid-1970s, we found a private Beechcraft plane off Delaporte Village. Then, off the Thunderball house, a small drug plane sank, and another thereafter off the Caves nearby.

Then the drug war came close to our family, when our mother and sister watched the DEA (US Drug Enforcement Agency) chase a drug plane into the water off Ranger Road, Lyford Cay, during a cocktail reception. The pilot clambered ashore with his dog and tried--despite being soaked and bleeding and having a dog – to blend in with the party!

At age 13 or so, my best friend and I set off on our first circumnavigation of New Providence in a 15’ Boston Whaler, when just off Yamacraw we saw an RBDF cutter and then a small drug plane in shallow water. The sailors could not get as close as we could, so we went swimming on the wreck and I was terrified while groping under the floorboards that I had found a human body. (Alas it was only insulation that looked like an arm flailing around. The RBDF inspected us afterwards.)

Then onto my friend’s parents’ place on eastern Rose Island, which was often trashed, burned, and desecrated as a signal from drug smugglers for us to stay away from it.

There are at least 10 wrecked aircraft on New Providence, an island just 21 miles long and seven wide. In other words, a wreck every five miles on average. That’s a lot. And it doesn’t take into account dozens of others offshore or on land.

Travelers to Lyndon Pindling International Airport (LPIA) might be surprised at the rich history of the plane that for years greeted them with a “Welcome to the Islands of The Bahamas” message painted down the fuselage. This particular plane model (Douglas C-47, or DC-3) was, like Windsor Field, built in World War II. (Equally surprising is that twin-propeller cargo planes still fly into Nassau daily, carrying meat for island restaurants.)

RAF historian Martin Pole has researched the “Welcome” plane, from its RAF (Royal Air Force) war service to the Venezuelan military. The plane had an accident in 1954, followed 15 years later by its entry into Panama’s Air Force. In 1981 it was sold to The Bahamas as “N4683U” to grace the entrance of the capitals’ airport.

In 2003 the aircraft starred in the movie Into The Blue, after being sent to the bottom as a dive site off Coral Harbor.

Typically, aircraft bounced from legitimate employment to shadier work for drug smugglers, from military to silver screen to the deep blue sea. However, the trails of some of the assets that litter the Bahamas today from the 1970s to 1990s don’t just lead researchers in circles. Fifty years ago, those trails could lead someone with an inquisitive mind to a resting place six feet under!

That’s because planes filled with millions of dollars in cocaine or marijuana were so vulnerable and valuable that they and their pilot’s connection to the planet was tenuous. Hundreds of people from--growers to financiers to soldiers of fortune to fuellers and speedboat runners, lookouts, lawyers, and many more--had vested interests in getting the cargo to the US market. They were not interested in leaving paper trails, and the planes were gossamer-thin threads connecting supplier with consumer. The entire scheme could be tipped off balance by fuel or engine issues, detection, betrayal, inexperience, illness, disorientation, folly and mistake, or by just plain accident.

Why so many accidents?

This stressful trade meant that planes were often overloaded and environmental flying conditions often overlooked or disregarded. The temperature at 11,000 feet in the mountain ranges of the Medellin Valley in Colombia were lower than in The Bahamas, which of course affected the flight. Pilots were sometimes inexperienced and unregulated, high, drunk, terrified, sleep deprived. Some fliers lacked confidence or experience (or both) flying aircraft that may have been stolen, bought cheap, poorly maintained or on the brink of failing (or all of those conditions!)

In A Smuggler's Paradise: Cocaine Trafficking Through The Bahamas, author Bruce Bullington analyses the unique role The Bahamas played in narcotics trafficking. In 1983, journalists working for the Miami Herald investigated charges made by convicted smugglers, allegations of participation in drug corruption by Bahamian officials. The special report they published described the nation as "a smuggler's paradise." They wrote about how The Bahamas was repeatedly implicated in drug smuggling, especially cocaine and marijuana destined for the US consumers. Reasons included coastal alignment with the US, and geopolitics: Colombians, Jamaicans, and others found an environment more than willing to accept pay for cooperation.

The Miami Herald’s infamous September 23, 1984 six-part take-down of The Bahamas in A Nation For Sale, included snippets of the thesis that “smugglers say everyone has a price.” They used the word of smugglers to argue that in The Bahamas everything--including access, justice, and even confiscated drug--can be bought back.

The newspaper series cited the UK Commission of Inquiry, or White Paper, on senior Bahamian political, financial, and legal executives. To the extent it relates to airplane wrecks, the smugglers were protected by the government and even enabled. The money flowed in quickly, and reputations bled out slowly. They were tempting times. One smuggler who was thrown into HM Fox Hill Prison commented that if two drug pilots were jailed, one would be released to work off the pay to get the other out.

Books about this epoch have colourful names for a reason: War On Drugs: Studies In The Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy; Snowbirds; Life and Death of the Medellin Cartel; Kings of Cocaine; Weed Man; Buccaneer: The Provocative Odyssey; No Ordinary Bird: Drug Smuggling, a Plane Crash, and a Daughter's Quest; The Pilot’s Double Life; Snow on the Palms; and Turning The Tide are just a few samples.

Several of the books speak to the extensive social damage and political and financial costs of the trade on societies, governments, and participants. That, and profits! Lots of them. People participated in the drug trade for the same reason they participate in publicly traded markets: fear and greed, or both. One US pilot made more in one flight than he had made in years as a fire fighter back home.

One character in the story: the aircraft

In this series of articles we’ll walk with the silent characters: the aircraft. One DC-3 was built in Christmas week 1943 in the Carolinas, served in Massachusetts, moved to civilian service in the 1970s, then was “Impounded at Nassau, Bahamas for drug smuggling in 1984.”

After that, tail number N3139F went to the Dominican Republic as HI-463, until 1986. Then it flew to Nassau in 1988, where it was possibly lined along the airport road. Folks park family cars there on weekends to watch planes land and pick pigeon plums, while passengers ogle at the row of mothballed trophies as their plan lands.

Another large warplane went to the RCAF of Canada in 1943, then to Michigan, then to Miami in 1966. Her slide into disrepute began with a Wilmington registry, then Palm Tree in 1970, and a year later was simply listed as “Derelict, Nassau.” A Dakota aircraft--which may well have trained in Nassau with over 10,000 airplanes at Oakes Field and Windsor Field in WWII (resulting in 178 accidents at least)-“crashed shortly after take-off from Nassau” on July 20, 2000, killing both pilots.

No indicators are that its operator, Allied Air Freight, was a drug outfit.

Many air accidents have occurred in our nation: real, commercial, regulated, for movies, helicopter, and, of course, private and illicit use that includes drugs, seaplanes, tourists and large commercial flights from overseas.

Nassau has always been the primary airport by land and sea: the seaplane ramp by BASRA and the PI Bridge, and mammoth Oakes Field (by University of The Bahamas) and Windsor Field (now LPIA, out west). The remains of hundreds and hundreds of airplanes from the drug smuggling heyday have stories to tell.

So put your seatbelts on and enjoy those aviation adventures as we examine them each Friday in the coming weeks.