Among those hired by Blackwater to fly under these unusual and dangerous circumstances were two experienced CASA pilots, thirty-seven-year-old Noel English and thirty-five-year-old Loren “Butch” Hammer. Both men had experience flying under unorthodox circumstances with little ground support in variable weather and terrain, as well as landing in nontraditional locations. English had logged nearly nine hundred hours in a CASA 212—most of it as a “bush pilot” in Alaska—while Hammer had spent years piloting and copiloting “smokejumpers” during the summer fire seasons in the United States, “dropping smoke divers and para-cargo on forest fires,” according to Kevin McBride, another Blackwater pilot who had previously worked with Hammer. “He was a knowledgeable and skilled First Officer, with lots of experience in mountain flying and low level missions.”19
After several weeks of training for the Afghanistan mission in Melbourne, Florida, Hammer and English arrived in Afghanistan on November 14, 2004.20 According to the U.S. Army, Presidential had a policy of not pairing any two pilots with less than a month “in the theater.”21 Presidential, however, paired Hammer and English, both of whom had been in the country for only two weeks, because they were the only crew the company had who, in addition to the CASA planes, could fly an SA-227 DC, or Metro plane, which could be used for flights to Uzbekistan.22 Presidential had two CASAs and one Metro plane in the theater. During their brief time in Afghanistan, Hammer and English had each logged thirty-three hours of flight time.23
On November 27, the pilots woke up at 4:30 a.m. to a crisp and clear forty-degree day at Bagram airport—the main prison facility for people detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and an alleged site of prisoner torture. 24 The Presidential crew would be leaving the base in a little less than three hours on a mission to transport a couple of U.S. soldiers and four hundred pounds of 81 mm mortar illumination rounds. The route would take them first to Farah, 450 miles southwest of Bagram, then to Shindad to refuel, and then back to Bagram, where they were scheduled to return at 1:30 p.m. Neither Hammer nor English had flown the route before.25
Bunking with the men at Bagram the night before were two other Presidential pilots who would be leaving at about the same time as Blackwater 61 and traveling on a similar route. Like Hammer and English, pilots Lance Carey and Robert Gamanche would fly a Blackwater CASA westward that morning, stopping at Shindad to refuel. Carey, who shared a room at Bagram with both English and Hammer for the three days prior to the flight, said, “They were both looking forward to [it].” Gamanche ate breakfast with English on the morning of the flight. Both crews reviewed that day’s weather forecast. “Since our flights would eventually take us to the same place [Shindad] and the forecast was marginal due to visibility, we decided to make a group go-no go decision,” Gamanche recalled. “If the current weather at [Shindad] was not favorable, we would stay on the ground.” There were no weather problems reported at either of the crews’ initial destinations. “The current weather was favorable so we all decided to go,” said Gamanche. Though there were indications that at Farah and Shindad gusting winds and blowing dust could make landing difficult, at Bagram “the weather was forecasted as clear with unlimited visibility.”26
The flight was a go. Melvin Rowe, a forty-three-year-old flight mechanic, joined the crew of Blackwater 61. Two passengers were slated to come on the flight, Spc. Harley Miller and Chief Warrant Officer Travis Grogan. They had loaded up the four hundred pounds of ammunition and begun to taxi when a soldier ran along the runway toward their plane. A third passenger would be joining them: Lt. Col. Michael McMahon, commander of the twenty-five-thousand-soldier Task Force Saber, which was responsible for the entire western region of Afghanistan—where Blackwater 61 was headed.27 McMahon, a Desert Storm veteran and West Point graduate,28 “was just an extra guy that showed up and [asked] if he could get on the flight,” one Blackwater employee explained. If they “ask us to do it and it’s not out of the common sense category, then they’ll do it.”29 There were now six people on board the plane.
At 7:38 a.m., Blackwater 61 took off from Bagram and headed northwest. The last thing the six of them would hear from anyone outside the flight was the Bagram tower telling them they would “talk to you later.” Five minutes after that, the plane dropped off Bagram’s radar, about nine miles out from the airport.30 Hammer, Blackwater 61’s copilot, quickly commented on the visibility, saying, “can’t ask for a whole lot better than this.” But it was apparent, even early in the flight, that the pilots didn’t quite know exactly where to go, as evidenced from the flight’s black box recording:31
Pilot English: “I hope I’m goin’ in the right valley.”
Copilot Hammer: “That one or this one.”
English: “I’m just going to go up this one.”
Hammer: “Well we’ve never or at least I’ve never done this Farah . . .
from Bagram so it would be a valley up here.”
The novice Afghanistan pilots clearly didn’t have a command of the route they would be covering, and English ultimately said, “We’ll just see where this leads.” The pilots and Rowe spent the next several minutes fumbling through maps trying to determine their location and route. Hammer said that he hadn’t brought a handheld global positioning system with them that would have issued a warning when the plane came close to the ground. About eight minutes into the flight, English expressed some concern about the weather in western Afghanistan, saying, “normally . . . on a short day like this we’d have time to play a little bit, do some explorin’, but with those winds comin’ up I want to [expletive] get there as fast as we can.”
Despite the early indications of some complications, the pilots spent some time during the flight chatting with each other, making small talk. “I swear to God, they wouldn’t pay me if they knew how much fun this was,” English said. The pilots had been riding through the Bamian Valley, although from the transcript of their in-flight conversations, it seemed they were somewhat uncertain and unconcerned as to exactly where they were. “I don’t see anythin’ over about thirteen three is the highest peak in the whole route I think,” said Rowe, the flight’s engineer. “Plenty of individual valleys,” English replied, “Yeah, so we’ll be able to pick our way around it. Yeah, with this good visibility [expletive] it’s as easy as pie. You run into somethin’ big and you just parallel it until you find a way through. Yeah, like I said, this is the first good visibility day I’ve had in the CASA. It’s not just good, it’s outstanding.”
At one point, the passengers asked the pilots what they’d be passing by on their way to Farah. Rowe, the man with the maps, replied, “I don’t know what we’re gonna see, we don’t normally go this route.” Seconds later, English said, “All we want to avoid is seeing rock at twelve o’clock.” Then Hammer—the copilot—turned his attention to pilot English’s apparent maneuvering of the plane: “Yeah, you’re an X-wing fighter Star Wars man.”
“You’re [expletive] right,” English shot back. “This is fun.”
As the pilots started encountering some mountains and apparently swerving to avoid getting boxed in, they continued with their friendly, casual banter. They talked about getting an MP3 player wired into their headphones; English said he wanted to listen to “Phillip Glass or somethin’ suitable New Age-y.” No, Hammer shot back, “we gotta have butt rock—that’s the only way to go. Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister.”
But four minutes later, roughly twenty-five minutes into the flight, things started to go terribly wrong for Blackwater 61. When they emerged from the Bamian Valley, they found themselves flying along the Baba Mountain range. “Well, this, ah, row of mountains off to our left—I mean, it doesn’t get much lower than about 14,000, the whole length of it, at least not till the edge of my map,” Hammer informed English, as they discussed how to get past the mountain. “Well, let’s kind of look and see if we’ve got anywhere we can pick our way through,” English responded. “Doesn’t really matter. It’s gonna spit us out down at the bottom, anyway. Let�
��s see, find a notch over here. Yeah, if we have to go to fourteen for just a second, it won’t be too bad.”
They soon decided to attempt a 180-degree turn. “Come on, baby. Come on, baby, you can make it,” English said, as though willing the plane upwards. Nervously, the engineer Rowe asked the pilots, “OK, you guys are gonna make this, right?”
“Yeah, I’m hopin’,” English replied.
The National Transportation Safety Board report said that at this point a sound similar to a “stall warning tone” could be heard on the black box recording. Inside the plane, chaotic conversation ensued before Rowe declared to the pilot, “Yeah, you need to, ah, make a decision.” Heavy breathing could be heard inside the plane, as English exclaimed, “God [expletive deleted].” Rowe called out, “Hundred, ninety knots, call off his airspeed for him.” At this point, the stall warning tone became constant, as the dialogue grew frantic, desperate.
“Ah [expletive] [expletive],” English called out.
Rowe said, “Call it off. Help him, or call off his airspeed for him . . . Butch.”
Copilot Hammer: “You got ninety-five. Ninety-five.”
Pilot English: “Oh, God. Oh [expletive].”
Engineer Rowe: “We’re goin’ down.”
“God.”
“God.”
In the midst of attempting a 180-degree turn after it became clear that Blackwater 61 would not be able to clear the 16,580-foot Baba Mountain, the plane’s right wing struck the mountain and was sheared off, causing the plane to tumble and skid for hundreds of feet, breaking apart the fuselage and crumpling the left wing under it. The pilots had been ejected 150 feet in front of the wreckage, and all of the passengers died on impact, except for Army Specialist Miller.32
Though the terrain on the route from Bagram to Farah was mountainous, Blackwater 61 had almost made it through the worst stretch of the flight. The plane cleared almost the entire Bamian Valley before the pilots decided to turn almost directly into Baba Mountain. As Blackwater pilot Kevin McBride later put it, “I really don’t know how the pilots . . . got to the location where they were found. . . . The ridgeline where [Blackwater 61] crashed is the highest point in the highest ridgeline on our route.”33
But the missteps involved in the accident were far from over. It wouldn’t be until six hours after the plane reached Farah—and one hour after it was due back at Bagram—that any sort of rescue/recovery mission would even begin. The search for Blackwater 61 was immediately hampered by the lack of any tracking devices on the plane and an apparent absence of information about its intended route, as well as confusion over who was even responsible for finding the aircraft. “Lacking any coordinated rescue effort, and taking into account the probability that the aircraft flew to the south, my unit developed large search sectors, essentially covering the majority of Afghanistan,” said Maj. David J. Francis, the operations officer for Task Force Wings, which was part of the Combined Joint Task Force 76. “There was some confusion as to who was going to run the rescue operation. At one point, the question was asked: ‘Who owns this mission?’” Francis added, “There was no coordinated rescue plan until [eleven hours after the flight was due back at Bagram] on the day of the crash.”34
It would be seventy-four hours before the wreckage was spotted and conditions allowed for CH-47 helicopters to reach the site and recover the remains, black box recorder, and the ammunition on board.35 Though Specialist Miller had survived the initial impact, he didn’t stand a chance of surviving the three days that passed before rescuers arrived. At the time of the crash, it was described in news reports as a basic accident—the kind of incident that ends up a small news item, if at all, in the papers. In fact, two weeks after Blackwater 61 went down, engineer Rowe’s wife described it as “a plain-old regular plane crash.”36
But as more details began to emerge and the military began to investigate, the families of the U.S. soldiers killed in the crash didn’t view it as a fluke accident. On June 10, 2005, the families of Michael McMahon, Travis Grogan, and Harley Miller sued Blackwater’s aviation subsidiaries, alleging negligence on the part of the flight crew and accusing the company of causing the soldiers’ deaths. Blackwater’s “gross and flagrant violations of safety regulations evince a reckless and conscious disregard of human life and for the rights and safety of their passengers,” the lawsuit alleged, saying the actions of the company “evince reckless and wanton corporate policies, procedures, planning, and flight operations.”37 Robert Spohrer, the attorney for the families, alleged the company was “cutting corners” in its service to the armed forces. “If they’re going to outsource to corporations services like flying personnel around Afghanistan, they must do it with corporations that put the safety of our men and women in uniform ahead of corporate profits. Sadly, that wasn’t done here.”38
Bolstering the families’ case was the fact that the U.S. Army Collateral Investigations Board found Blackwater at fault for the crash, determining after a lengthy investigation that the crew suffered from “degraded situational awareness” and “inattention and complacency” as well as “poor judgment and willingness to take unacceptable risks.”39 The investigation also determined it was possible that the pilots were suffering from visual illusions and hypoxia, whose symptoms can include hallucinations, inattentiveness, and decreased motor skills. Further, the Army said there was demonstrated evidence of “inadequate cross-checking and crew coordination.”40 Presidential Airways said the report “was concluded in only two weeks and contains numerous errors, misstatements, and unfounded assumptions.”41
In December 2006, nearly two years after Army investigators concluded their report, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a report of its own. The NTSB concluded that Blackwater’s pilots “were behaving unprofessionally and were deliberately flying the nonstandard route low through the valley for ‘fun.’” The board also found that the pilots’ vision and judgment might have been impaired because they were not using oxygen, potentially in violation of federal regulations. “According to studies . . . a person without supplemental oxygen will exhibit few or no signs, have virtually no symptoms, and will likely be unaware of the effect,” the board said.42
But perhaps the most significant finding, as a result of autopsies not mentioned in the earlier Army report, was that Specialist Miller had “an absolute minimum survival time of approximately eight hours” after the accident, and that if Miller “had received medical assistance within that time frame, followed by appropriate surgical intervention, he most likely would have survived.” But, the board found, because Presidential Airways allegedly did not have procedures required by federal law to track flights, “by the time air searches were initiated, [Miller] had been stranded at the downed airplane for about seven hours,” and “his rescue was further delayed when the subsequent five hours of aerial searches were focused in areas where the airplane had not flown.”43
Joseph Schmitz, general counsel for Blackwater’s parent company, The Prince Group (who will be discussed in detail in a later chapter), described the report as “erroneous and politically motivated,” according to the Raleigh News & Observer, and “said the report was intended to cover for the military’s failures, but declined to elaborate on those failures. It was clear, he said, that the NTSB hadn’t completed the rudiments of a proper accident investigation, which he called a disgrace to the victims and U.S. taxpayers,” and added that the company would ask the NTSB to reconsider its findings.44
In fact, though the NTSB did blame the pilots and Presidential, it also blamed both the FAA and Pentagon for not providing “adequate oversight,” and one NTSB member wrote a concurring opinion that highlighted the jurisdictional confusion in investigating “a civilian accident that occurred in a theater of war while the operator was conducting operations on behalf of the Department of Defense.” The NTSB’s Deborah Hersman called it “perplexing” that the Defense Department and FAA had not sorted out responsibility for “these types of flights” and
added that even though the FAA was faulted for oversight, neither it nor the NTSB had personnel assigned to Afghanistan.45 Those issues, combined with Hersman’s description of Blackwater 61 as “clearly a military operation subject to DoD control,” spoke directly to the tack Blackwater took in defending itself against the wrongful death lawsuit.
Blackwater’s response strategy to the Afghanistan lawsuit closely paralleled that of its Fallujah defense: Blackwater and its subsidiaries are part of the Defense Department’s “Total Force” and are therefore immunized against tort claims. Blackwater stiffly resisted acknowledging that the courts had any jurisdiction in the case and moved to stop the trial’s discovery process at every turn, arguing that even allowing its employees to be deposed would interfere with its immunity. Blackwater’s lawyers argued, “Immunity from suit does not mean just that a party may not be found liable, but rather that it cannot be sued at all and need not be burdened with even participating in the lawsuit. To require Presidential to engage in discovery thus would eviscerate the immunity that Presidential has.”46
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