The Bahamian Islands, because of their proximity to the U.S. East Coast, have historically been a perfect staging ground for smuggling contraband into the U.S. Over the years this contraband has morphed from weapons and rum running during Prohibition, to illegal migrants from Haiti, Cuba and other countries, and most noticeably, illegal drugs coming from South America.
In an effort to stem the flow of cocaine and marijuna into the Bahamas and thence into the U.S., the governments of the U.S., Bahamas, and Turks & Caicos islands entered into an agreement in 1982 to form a joint task force, called Operations Bahamas, Turks & Caicos (or OPBAT for short). You can find a short article about the history of OPBAT here:
There is also some State Department information here:
https://www.state.gov/the-bahamas
The DEA, U.S. Army, and the U.S. Coast Guard provided helicopters dedicated to this mission. The Army provided two blackhawk helicopters and crews based out of Georgetown, Exumas.
The Coast Guard provided four helicopters and crews based two each out of Nassau and Great Inagua, Bahamas. Intially these were HH3F amphibious helicopters, but were later replaced by the HH60J Jayhawk.
(The DEA Huey helicopter, based out of Nassau, was used only occasionally.) During some of the larger missions, U.S. Customs helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft and Coast Guard fixed-wing aircraft might also become involved.
To make law enforcement operations by U.S. aircraft legal when operating in the countries of the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos, we had a rather eclectic crew onboard our OPBAT helicopters. In addition to the normal USCG flight crew (pilot, copilot, flight mechanic, rescue swimmer), we carried a DEA agent (who was the mission commander), one law enforcement officer from the Bahamas, and another from the Turks & Caicos. This gave us the authority to operate in those countries.
Although the methods used by the drug cartels constantly changes, during this time period their modus operandi was for a twin-engine airplane to depart an airstrip somewhere deep in the Columbian jungle loaded with waterproofed bales of cocaine, each weighing about 80 lbs. The planes would typically fly north to Cuba, cross over Cuba, then rendezvous with a “go fast” boat out of the Bahamas at a secret, pre-arranged location somewhere in the Bahamian archipelago. The aircrew would drop the cocaine out of the plane then head back to Columbia, the boat crew would retrieve it then beat feet at high speed either directly to the U.S. or, more typically, to a nearby Bahamian island where it would be stashed for further transport to the U.S. later.
If we drug interdiction forces didn’t have any “intelligence” information about such an impending “drop”, this was indeed a successful method for the cartels to get drugs from Columbia to the U.S. However, a large part of the drug interdiction effort was gathering intelligence, both human (i.e., informants) and electronic (i.e., eavesdropping on phone calls and radio conversations). Most of the missions on which we flew involved previous intel that had at least the basics of when and where a drop was likely to occur. Our job was to get there right after the plane dropped the drugs but before the boat had retrieved them so that we could recover the drugs and hopefully arrest the boat crew. (We weren’t allowed to shoot down the planes.) 🙁
Knowing when a drug-laden plane would be departing Columbia (and this almost always happened at night), allowed a U.S. Customs or U.S. Coast Guard jet to be waiting for it off the coast of Columbia to surepticiously track it and follow it north. This would provide us with a constantly-updated position, course, and speed of the plane, allowing us to time our ambush accordingly.
However, the druggies weren’t stupid and knew how to play the game, so often, once the drug plane got over the island of Cuba, they would drop to low level (so weren’t detectable by the Customs or Coast Guard aircraft’s radar anymore) then change course to pop out of the north side of Cuba at some location known only to them and the waiting go-fast. (The U.S. aircraft were not permitted to fly over Cuba, but Castro had no problem letting the druggies go through. Anything to be a thorn in the side of the Americans.)
Of course, we also had tricks, like AWACS-type aircraft with big rotating antennae on top that could locate the aircraft when it did pop out the other side, when we would have to scamble to get there before the go-fast got away with the drugs.
Once the go-fast got the drugs, it was much more difficult to get them back because they could last underway a lot longer than could a helicopter; we typically only had enough fuel for a couple of hours on scene, but the go-fasts would carry many 50-gallon barrels of fuel with them and could go hours and hours, if not days, at speed if necessary. Thus, if we didn’t have enough resources to keep swapping out aircraft to keep them under observation, they would eventually be left without an “escort”, would then change course, and disappear somewhere in the 700 islands and islets of the Bahamas.
However, most of the time these E-2-type aircraft’s were not available to us, so it was often hit or miss whether we be able to affect a successful ambush. The amount of intel we received for each mission was always different; there were always plenty of unknowns.
On this specific night, the powers that be had received intel that a drop would be made off of west side of Anguilla Cay, which was an isolated island about 150 miles southwest of Nassau and only 50 miles north of Cuba.
I was the aircraft commander on duty, so we were called to the U.S. Embassy (where the DEA had its operations center) for a briefing as soon as we came on duty at 3:00 pm. We learned that the drop was supposed to happen between 3 and 4 am, so the plan was to have us pre-position to Fresh Creek airport on Andros Island by midnight to be closer to the drop zone.
A DEA boat would also be loitering close by to monitor the drop and hopefully capture the go-fast. We were there to assist as necessary. A U.S. Customs jet would hopefully be able to tail the drug plane from Columbia at least to Cuba. When the cartel’s aircraft got close to Cuba, we would get airborne but loiter on the east side of Anguilla Cay, about 20 miles away from where the drop was supposed to occur so as to not give away our presence until the bales were in the water. Once they were, we would move in, our actions to be dictated by what would be happening when we got there.
We put on a maximum fuel load, not only because of the distance to the scene (it would be a minimum of 300 miles round trip, with no fuel stops in between it and Nassau), and because we knew there was a possibility we’d have to stay overhead with the go-fast for an extended period of time.
Everything went according to plan. Around 11:30 pm we took off from Nassau and flew the 30 miles to Fresh Creek and shut down on the small airstrips ramp. It was closed, so we just sat (or laid) around on the tarmac waiting for word when to launch. Around 2:30 am, we got word that everything was still on schedule, and that we should take off by 3:00 am, proceed to the loitering area and await further instructions. We did that, and after about a half-hour of loitering, we received word that the drop had occurred, the bad-guy plane was heading back south, the Customs boat was chasing the go-fast, and the drugs were all still in the water. They wanted us to locate and retrieve as much of the contraband as we could to be used for evidence.
We flew to the area just west of Anguilla Cay, and using our night vision goggles, immediately saw a long line of lights in the water stretching from north to south. (The druggies would often tie chem sticks to the bales for easy location by the go-fast boat crews.) It was fairly easy to see the path the plane had flown as it dropped the bales, one by one, into the water.
It was good that we were in an HH3F, which is amphibious, because we could simply land next to the bales and pull them aboard. We made an approach to the most northern light, landed on the water a short distance away, then water taxied up to it. Sure enough, the light was tied to a large bale of what no doubt was cocaine. The flight mechanic pulled it out of the water and put it in the back of the aircraft. We could just barely see the next light bobbing a few hundred yards south of us.
At this point we had two options: We could either pull back into a hover, scoot over to the next bale and make another approach and landing to the water next to it, or we could remain on the water and water taxi to it. The former would be much quicker, but the problem would eventually be the salt spray.
Helicopters, especially during takeoff and landing, exert a tremendous amount of rotor downwash. This causes a cloud of saltwater mist to engulf the aircraft. This mist hits the rotor blades (essentially its rotating wings) and the compressor blades of the engine (which are also small, aerodynamic airfoils) where it sticks and accumulates. Eventually, this salt will build up to a point where the airfoils start losing effectiveness. In the case of the rotor blades, it means they don’t provide enough lift. For the engines, they begin providing less and less power, and can even get to the point where they experience a compressor stall (almost like a backfire in a car engine). The H3 was especially susceptible to this.
In fact, when operating in such an environment (like hoisting to a boat for a long period of time), we were required to periodically execute a procedure where would would back off, manually take control of one engine at a time to set a specific compressor RPM, then see what the exhaust temperature of the engine was. As that temperature slowly climbed from one test to the next, we would eventually reach a limit when we had to abort the mission to avoid getting compressor stall.
Seeing how many lights there were, and how much salt spray we would likely generate at each takeoff and landing to them, we decided to just use the low power setting that it took to water taxi from bale to bale. It would take longer to retrieve all the bales this way, but it would generate almost no rotor wash. Luckily, the seas were calm, making doing this comfortable and safe.
So that’s what we did. Acting more like a boat than a helicopter, we proceeded from bale to bale, the flight mechanic conning me in as we got close so the bale would end up right at the cabin door, where the mechanic and rescue swimmer would snatch it out of the water and stow it in a growing stack in the back of the helo. We continued this procedure until we had retrieved 23 bales1. It had taken us over two hours; we finished just as dawn was breaking.
At this point, the adrenaline from getting such a huge bust was starting to wear off, the sun was starting to bake us through the cockpit greenhouse (the H3 had no air conditioning), we had already been awake since the previous morning, and had been flying, on and off, since 11:30 pm. We were getting very tired and were also approaching our crew duty time limitation. We would have to head back to Nassau right away.
So, as we pulled the last bale aboard and the flight mechanic secured the cabin door, we did some quick calculations to ensure we were under max gross weight. The crew estimated that the bales weighed about 1800 lbs, and we still had all that extra fuel aboard, but luckily, we were just under max weight. So, I called for the pre-takeoff checklist, pulled pitch to lift from the water, and turned towards our base in Nassau.
However, soon after the hull cleared the water, we heard an audible alarm and saw the “Tail Gearbox Chip” fault light on the warning console flashing. Crap!
This caution light came from one of the chip detectors on the aircraft. Chip detectors are basically magnets located in the sumps of some engines and transmissions. If the engine or transmission runs out of oil, say, or for any other reason starts chewing itself apart, the little pieces of metal (chips) produced by this would theoretically sink to the bottom of the sump and attach themselves to the magnet, completing a circuit which would turn on the light in the cockpit. In this case, the light was a warning that the transmission that turned the tail rotor might be disintegrating! Takeoff was when the most demand was put on the tail rotor, especially at max gross weight.
The emergency procedure required a landing “as soon as possible” which meant the closest suitable safe landing area, which for helicopters typically meant the next field. After landing, the helicopter would be shut down, and the mechanic would unscrew the chip detector and examine the piece of metal that was stuck on the magnet. It was normal for a buildup of harmless gear “dust” (called fuzz) to eventually accumulate on the magnet enough to close the circuit. In such cases, it was simply wiped off, the chip detector was reinserted, and the mission could continue (after various approvals from the powers that be).
In other cases, there might actually be a small piece of metal on the magnet. Then, it all depended on the shape and size of the piece of metal, the specifics of which were all carefully detailed in the HH-3F maintenance manual. Pieces below a certain size were treated the same was as fuzz. An intermediate size would require flushing out the transmission fluid, refilling it with fresh lubricant, then hovering for a half hour or so to see if it would trigger again. If not, then the mission could continue. For pieces above a certain size, the transmission was condemned. Of course, out here in the middle of nowhere, we had neither spare transmission fluid or even a maintenance manual.
Knowing all this, I didn’t want to just set the helo back down in the water because that would have been unsafe if we ended up there for any extended length of time. (The seas were calm now, but that could change and the HH-3F was rated for only 2-3 foot seas.) It would also have made troubleshooting almost impossible. And what if it turned out to be a large piece which condemned the gearbox? We’d be stuck floating in the middle of the south Atlantic. Good chance of losing the helicopter in that case.
Since it had just turned daylight, we could see Anguilla Cay was only about a half mile away. One other option would be to land back in the water and water taxi all the way to the island. But I didn’t have a nautical chart, so didn’t know whether there were any reefs or rocks between us and the island, and would likely have to come up to a hover anyway to get over the beach and on to solid ground to land on the wheels.
Since it was only a short distance, I decided to continue hovering all the way to the island to hopefully find a clear, flat section on which to land and shutdown. We would then be in a much safer position for whatever circumstance we found ourselves in. The danger with that decision, of course, was if the tail gear box was truly coming apart and failed on us while we were hovering over to the island. If it failed, the tail rotor would stop spinning. The tail rotor is what prevents the helicopter fuselage from spinning uncontrollably in the opposite direction that the engines are spinning the rotor blades. If the tail rotor failed, we would start spinning rapidly clockwise, and the only way to stop it would be to immediately turn off both engines! But, the odds were that it was just fuzz or a small piece of metal. In my experience up to that point, I had gotten dozens of chip lights in helicopters, but never had one turned out to be a failing gearbox. So, that experience played into my decision making. I was paid to make the big decisions, so I made one.
(This was one of those situations where if the tail gear box had let go while we were enroute to the island, I would have been hung from the yardarm for not just staying on the water where we were safe. But, if I had elected to just sit on the water and the helicopter capsized when the seas picked up, I would have been hung from the yardarm for not just repositioning over to the nearby island. Again, what Aircraft Commanders got paid big bucks to decide.)
So, with the copilot’s hand on both engines’ throttles–so he could immediately shutoff both engines if we started spinning–we hovered-taxied at low level towards the island at a slow enough speed so that I could hopefully make a safe hovering autorotation water landing if worse came to worse.
In the event, we made it to shore without incident and found a suitable landing area a couple hundred feet inland from the beach, where we immediately landed and shutdown the aircraft. Somehow, we managed to remember to put the wheels down before we landed. (The wheels are retracted for water operations.) This was summer in the Bahamas, and even though it was now only about 7 am, it was already getting hot, and the cockpit was facing due east, right into the rising sun. 🙁
As the mechanic started breaking out his tools, we cranked up the auxiliary power unit (a small turbine engine would was run on the ground to provide electrical power to the aircraft) because I had a number of radio calls to make, both to Nassau, and all the way back to Air Station Clearwater.
During OPBAT missions, we were always under a radio “guard”—i.e., constant communications with a radioman to whom we relayed our position and status every fifteen minutes or so. For this we used our long-range high-frequency (HF) radio. The long range of this radio was possible because its relatively long wavelengths could bounce off the ionosphere and the surface of the earth to travel long distances. This was often hit or miss, however, and the quality often depended on the skill and experience of the helicopter radioman (who was also the rescue swimmer) to play around with various frequencies and other settings depending on our locations, time of day, sunspots, etc.
Luckily, during this mission, the HF comms had been quite good (as they usually were at night), so we had been able to keep the OPBAT operations center constantly informed of what we were experiencing and what our intentions were. A last call to them to ensure them that we were “safe on deck” and commencing troubleshooting pretty much ended our responsibilities to them—at least until we knew what our final status would be. Which at this point could be anything from the transmission being condemned and another helicopter having to fly in to retrieve us while the air station figured out how to get a maintenance team and all the tools and parts to a deserted island in the middle of nowhere to install a new transmission, to us being able to fly it home ourselves.
However, there were obstacles to that second possibility, as well. The first was that we would undoubtably be exceeding our crew mission time for the duty period. For safety reasons, there were limits to not only how many hours a crew could fly in one day, but also now long they could be involved in the mission in one day. So even if you weren’t in the air, but were flight planning (or sitting on an airport tarmac waiting to get launched or getting briefed at the embassy), it was all considered duty time. And ours would expire in about an hour. To continue flying at that point would require a waiver from our Operations Officer back at Clearwater. He would evaluate our situation, or state of mind and fatigue level, etc., then either grant the waiver or not. That was one of the calls required to Air Station Clearwater.
The other was to the maintenance side, and for a number of reasons. The first was that we didn’t carry a maintenance manual aboard because the “manual” actually consisted of many large books, which we simply didn’t have room for. So, our flight mechanic would have to confer with his colleagues who had the manuals open in front of them to confirm not only the correct procedure for checking the chip detector, but for evaluating the size of any “chip” that he found on the magnet.
Lastly, if everything pointed to us being able to continue flying, we would have to get a maintenance release from one of the maintenance officers, which was required whenever a precautionary landing was made. This was to ensure that all the i’s were dotted and T’s crossed; that everything was legal and safe from the maintenance side.
So, I contacted the Coast Guard communications center on the HF radio, asked for a phone patch2 to the air station, and gave everyone involved a heads-up about what had happened, what we were doing, and what we would need from them.
So, such was the situation as the mechanic began breaking out his tools to begin the long and hot process of checking the tail gearbox chip detector. This required him to climb onto the roof of the helicopter, walk all the way back to the tail, then climb up that (using a ladder incorporated into it) to start work. The rescue swimmer assisted him.
In the meantime, there was nothing the rest of us could do but wait. There was no shade anywhere in site on the small island, so we just continued to sit in the cockpit. The law enforcement personnel in the back, most who had flown this mission for years, were used to such things and we either chatting or sleeping.
I, for one, couldn’t help thinking about the millions of dollars’-worth of cocaine we had sitting in the back of the helicopter. And the fact that we had enough fuel on board to make it pretty far—easily to Cuba or Jamaica. I have to admit that it crossed my mind to evaluate who my crew was and whether it would have been possible to get seven people to go along with such a nefarious scheme. Stranger things had happened. But then I realized that I was just tired—that such a option would no doubt lead to a very bad ending3.
Every so often, the flight mechanic would show up at my window, give me an update, and sometimes request that I relay a question or a piece of information to his superiors back in Clearwater. I would establish contact the same way, and thus acted as the intermediary for them for the next couple of hours.
One thing I didn’t mention was that while we had the ability to use encoded (secure) transmissions when talking on the HF radio, doing so often reduced its power and rang. I also can’t remember if a phone patch was possible when using encrypted communications. Either way, for whatever reason, we were not communicating in a “secure” manner, which meant that anyone on the same frequency, pretty much anywhere in the world, could eavesdrop on the conversations I was having, even the phone-patches part. And, of course, the Coast Guard communications center would be actively listening to the entire conversation. But, since we weren’t discussing any sensitive operational issues, it was no big deal.
Eventually, the flight mechanic got the chip detector pulled and showed up at my window holding a very small wire-like piece of metal. It was short and very thin. It was what had triggered the light. To me it looked insignificant, but what did I know? We would have to call it in, the maintenance experts would compare it with the criteria in the maintenance manual and determine what our next moves would have to be.
So, with the flight mechanic standing outside my window holding the piece of metal, I initiated another phone patch with the maintenance folks, and we started a discussion. As the sun was coming up, the quality of the HF radio comms was getting noticeably poorer and words often had to be repeated to be understood. We managed to successfully communicate the length of the piece (which the mechanic had measured), but describing the thickness of it was proving troublesome. After a number of back and forths which didn’t seem to resolve their understanding of how thin it was (and the thinness was critical, after all), without thinking (and here I claim tiredness again) I blurted out, “It’s thinner than an RCH.4” I saw the mechanic’s jaw drop open. There was silence on the other end, and I realized what I had just broadcast–me, a Coast Guard officer–to possibly the whole world! Oy yoy yoy. Then I heard the maintenance side come back on the line, and with some chuckling, say, “You are cleared to fly back to Nassau.” Whew!
Now we had to wait in the heat for the mechanic to re-install the chip detector and sign off the log book all of which took at least another hour. It was getting harder and harder to stay awake, and I did actually doze off a number of times, as did the copilot. Finally, when the flight mech was all done, I put in a phone patch to our Operations Officer to request a waiver to the crew rest limits. At this point it was almost noon, and we had launched 12 and a half hours earlier. We had actually started the mission at 3 pm the previous day, so hadn’t even slept in over 24 hours! We had about an hour-and-15-minute flight ahead of us to get back to our base. I was exhausted; we all were.
But, what were we going do to if not fly back to Nassau? We were on an isolated, “dry” (no water), deserted island in the middle of nowhere, it was stifling hot, so we wouldn’t get any real rest if we remained, and it wasn’t like the oncoming crew would come to retrieve us and leave our helicopter here unattended. There was really only one option.
So, I lied my ass off when the Operations Officer asked me if we were fit to fly, weren’t too tired, etc. And he of course, also knowing the situation, was hoping I’d be smart enough to say that. Otherwise, it would have turned into a major logistical nightmare, put the base out of service for probably days, and cost the taxpayers many thousands of dollars. So, we both played the game, he gave me my waiver, we cranked up the helo, took off, and headed towards Nassau.
There is only one other time when I’ve been so tired when flying5. I had the controls, aimed us for Nassau, then spent the next hour and 15 minutes trying deperately to stay awake. Shortly after takeoff, the copilot was out cold, his helmet lying snuggly against his side window and drool running down his chin. A look back into the cabin confirmed that everyone was already asleep back there, too. I couldn’t blame them. It had been a very, very long and fatiguing day and night. So, I was the only one awake, and barely at that.
I can remember trying to do my normal, routine scan of the engine and transmission instruments (as every pilot does just to make sure everything is “in the green”) and not being able to even understand which gauge I was looking at or what it was telling me. I couldn’t focus on anything. All I could do was keep the helicopter pointed in the general direction as we droned over water for mile after mile. I remember praying to gods unknown, “Please don’t let anything else happen to this helicopter because I won’t have a clue what to do!” I was operating at about 10% capacity.
I remember occasionally hearing the rescue swimmer giving his “Ops Normal” calls, so he had at leased roused himself long enough to do those. He must have set an alarm or something. But at this point, I was barely aware of anything.
However, as we approached Nassau’s airspace (which required talking with ATC), I seemed to get a second wind—at least enough to bring myself back to about 50% capacity. I woke up my copilot, we did our normal calls and before landing checklists, finally touched down at the base, and shutdown the helo at 1:00 pm. While our 24-hour duty shift still had another two hours to go, I informed the powers that be that we were out of service for the rest of our hitch.
I remember us stopping at the Nassau McDonalds on the way back to our condo, because we suddenly realized that we had not eaten anything since dinner the previous night. So, we stuffed ourselves with Bahamian Big Macs, fries, and apple pies, then finally hit the sack in our nice, air conditioned rooms, not caring one bit about having participated in one of the biggest drug busts in OPBAT history.
The below photos are not of our bust, but of two, smaller busts in subsequent years (when we had switched to the Jayhawks), just to give you and idea of what a bale of cocaine looks like. We had 23 of those aboard!
- I don’t remember what those bales were worth in the early ‘90’s, but they would be about $90 million in street value today! ↩︎
- A phone patch is when the radioman in the communications center can “attach” an incoming radio call to an outgoing phone call, which makes it possible to call any phone from the helicopter. ↩︎
- I will post soon a story about when I realized what being in the drug trade is really like after a couple experiences during my 10 years fighting the War on Drugs. These incidents made me realize that no money is worth getting caught up in that lifestyle. ↩︎
- I will not explain what that means here. You’ll have to look it up. ↩︎
- And that is another story I’ll post sometime about a flight with my Commanding Office in Germany when I was a young copilot and how much I learned from him on that day ↩︎