"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)."

FMI: www.blackwaterusa.com