Word: cessnas
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...operation was at last under way, as U.S. pilots flew Leopards (as the special police of Bolivia's antidrug unit are known) on four raids. In the first one, 30 of the troops jumped out of two choppers near a 15-tent drug complex just as a Cessna aircraft was landing nearby. The pilot fled into the jungle, but his 17-year-old helper was seized. The raiders destroyed a log-frame laboratory where coca leaves were converted into coca paste...
Most cocaine arrives in the U.S. aboard private aircraft, which the smugglers consider expendable. Even a $450,000 Cessna twin-engine plane costs far less than the millions of dollars of cocaine it can carry. The latest stunt among cocaine pilots has been to air-drop a shipment of cocaine, then put the aircraft on automatic pilot and bail out. One pilot laden down with 79 lbs. of cocaine was killed last September in Tennessee when his parachute failed...
...dead of night over western North Carolina, a twin-engine Cessna plunges into a mountainside in the Nantahala National Forest. There is no trace of the pilot. Having bailed out 70 miles to the northwest over Tennessee, he now lies dead in a suburban Knoxville backyard, tangled in the reserve parachute that he apparently opened too late. Strapped to his body is a green Army duffel bag containing $15 million in cocaine...
...case of Andrew Thornton is still hazy, but it appears that he used extra fuel bladders to equip his Cessna, a favorite of smugglers because its ability to fly slowly permits accurate drops. He then flew eight hours from Colombia to Tennessee before jumping. Along the way, he apparently dropped 200 lbs. of cocaine by parachute in the vicinity of Georgia's Chattahoochee River, where it landed in a tree and was recovered by narcotics agents...
...clear day. Light winds. Nothing should have gone wrong. Yet barely had the single-engine Cessna 208 Caravan lifted off in Jenkinsburg, Ga., last week when it stalled and plunged into a pasture from 1,000 ft., too suddenly for the pilot or any of the 16 experienced skydivers to escape. All were killed, their bodies crushed against one another in the front of the plane...