"This Is Fun."
If you had just moments to live,
what would you do? What would you say?
It's the latter question that haunts both NTSB investigators
probing the crash of a Blackwater USA CASA C-212 in Afghanistan,
and Congressional investigators looking into accusations that the
private North Carolina firm is a renegade operation in both Iraq
and Afghanistan.
"I swear to God, they wouldn't pay me if they knew how much fun
this was," said Noel English, pilot of the doomed CASA flight
operated by Presidential Airways, a Blackwater affiliate, as he
zig-zagged through canyons in November, 2004. He was quoted by
CNN.
"You're an X-wing fighter Star Wars man," his equally-doomed
co-pilot Loren Hammer replied, referring to the 1977 film "Star
Wars."
"You're [expletive] right. This is fun," English agreed.
But passengers were less than confident that the cockpit crew
knew what it was doing. When asked by an unidentified passenger
about the route of flight on that 2004 mission, flight mechanic
Melvin Rowe said, "I don't know what we're gonna see. We don't
normally go this route."
To that, English added, "All we want is to avoid seeing
rock at 12 o'clock."
Eight minutes later, both pilots were dead, along with the
engineer and two military passengers. A third passenger survived
the impact, but later died of internal injuries.
As ANN reported more than two years
ago, the families of the three military victims are
suing Blackwater, alleging the company didn't "provide adequate
oversight of the contract carrier's operations in Afghanistan."
Blackwater is in hot water on Capitol Hill, accused of rogue
operations that cost the lives of scores of innocent Americans,
Afghans and Iraqis over the course of the war on terror.
"The corporation hired inexperienced pilots. They sent them on a
route they didn't know about," said California Democratic
Congressman Henry Waxman. "It seems to me that it's more than pilot
error. There ought to be corporate responsibility, and Blackwater
was the corporation involved."
That's the kind of talk that might make Blackwater CEO Erik
Prince wince. "We provided thousands and thousands of flight hours
of arrival service since then. Today, still, we're flying more than
a thousand missions a month."
But that seems of little comfort to one passenger's widow. Col.
Jeanette McMahon, whose husband, Lt. Col. Michael McMahon died
aboard the 2004 flight in Afghanistan, wrote Congress the crash as
the result of "gross lack of judgment in managing
(Blackwater)."