Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

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. 35Though 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.” 37Robert 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