Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce Page A

any suitable landing area if the engine failed over most of the terrain over which the SRS mission is flown. The continued use of this platform invites a catastrophic impact in mountainous terrain if there is an engine failure.…” Cockes and Hooper asked that Northrop Grumman immediately replace the single-engine Caravan with a more powerful dual-engine Beechcraft King Air 300 series aircraft. “This is uniquely an issue of safety and a recommendation that will possibly save lives, limit the companies’ exposure and enhance the mission’s performance.”
    The concerns of Hooper and Cockes were ignored. The two pilots had tried to rally support from Thomas Howes and Tommy Janis (the pilot who was killed by the guerrillas after his successful crash landing on February 13, 2003), but Howes and Janis, although agreeing with Hooper and Cockes to some extent, refused to add their names to the complaint and continued to fly missions. Their decision and the company’s refusal to upgrade the aircraft to a dual-engine plane made Hooper and Cockes furious. According to those working at the airport hangars where CMS had its Bogotá offices, the single-engine problem was already well known. In August 2001, the Cessna that Janis was flying lost power at thirteen thousand feet, twenty miles out over theCaribbean Sea. He was an excellent pilot and was able to glide the plane to a safe landing at the airport in Santa Marta, in northern Colombia. Because Janis had been on a flight to Miami for aircraft maintenance and not on an official reconnaissance mission at the time, there was no report filed or any investigation into the cause of the engine failure.
    Although the pilots continued to fly missions, infighting between the pilots and CMS management about safety issues was rampant. Thomas Schmidt, who was a Vietnam veteran, had nearly come to blows with the CMS site manager, Steve McCune, who Schmidt believed had no idea about flying and therefore no business telling pilots what to do. The animosity between the two resulted in write-ups for Schmidt for flying too close to a mountain and endangering the crew. “They never asked for Tommy’s side of the story,” says Sharon Schmidt, Tommy Schmidt’s wife. “Tommy was pretty angry about that. He said, ‘Why not talk to the guys who were
in
the plane?’ But they reprimanded Tommy, which was
really
stupid. It was just another reason why there was so much animosity there.”
    At the base where many of the contracting companies had offices, several who knew McCune saw it differently. “McCune was a professional. He was very strict, very competent,” one of McCune’s business colleagues said. “Hooper and Cockes were well paid, but they were disconnected because of the way they would rotate in and out of the country. The pilots only flew. They didn’t check the airplanes. They would fly, go home, and not work any more than that.” Another point of contention had to do with handguns that had been issued by Northrop Grumman. Although U.S. military Joint Doctrine recommends against giving contractors arms and uniforms, the air force provides that arms should be issued “only in the most unusual circumstances” and states that carrying firearms is strictly voluntary. “It was basically that we would only be issued the weapons when we went out to fly,” says Hooper. “Our position was that we needed them flying and certainly driving around in Bogotá.” Many were afraid that the hour-long commute from their apartments to the airport could turn deadly, since bandits commonly approached drivers in traffic and robbed them at knifepoint, sometimes kidnapping people from their cars. According to Hooper and others, McCune was not happy that his employees werealways armed, especially given the very volatile nature of his relationship with several of them. In early 2002, McCune told his employees that he