Blackwater 61 - The Crash, the Lawsuit, the Problems

A US Army COL is suing Blackwater over the crash of their contracted flight in Afghanistan in which her husband was killed. A much longer article than this excerpt, and worth reading.

But it was an accident that never should have happened and you would not be hearing about it now if it weren't for his widow, herself a former high-ranking Army officer, who has waged a five-year battle against one of the military's most important contractors.

"He would have liked to have been able to go out, you know, fighting. Not in the back of some plane, somebody else's victim," Army Colonel Jeanette McMahon told "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft.

Col. McMahon was no ordinary widow and in her mind her husband was the victim of Blackwater. Until her retirement a few months ago, the West Point graduate and former helicopter pilot seemed to be a future candidate for general, but her life changed when her husband and West Point classmate was killed on a routine flight back to his cavalry squadron in western Afghanistan.

And while still on active duty, she decided to sue Blackwater's aviation subsidiary for flagrant safety violations and reckless disregard for human life.


"I wanted to understand what happened. For me, if I couldn't be there when he died I felt like I wanted to at least be able to recreate what happened," she told Kroft.

She says it took her a year to get the full story, which begins early on the morning of November 27, 2004 at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, where Lt. Colonel McMahon had been meeting with his superiors. He hitched a last-minute ride on Blackwater 61, joining two of his soldiers for the two-and-a-half hour flight into a dusty airstrip at Farah.

Forty minutes later the plane's wreckage would be scattered near the top of one of Afghanistan's tallest mountains, far from any logical route.

"What was your reaction when you first found out that the plane had crashed at almost 15,000 feet?" Kroft asked.

"Well, what the heck were they doing up there? It was clearly not anything to do with the mission or where they were going," McMahon replied.

Asked if she thinks they were lost, McMahon said, "Oh, absolutely. Absolutely."

We decided to retrace the flight to try and find out how Blackwater 61 got so far off track on a morning when the flying conditions were perfect. Some of the answers you'll hear from the pilots themselves in this cockpit voice recording recovered at the crash scene.

By: Brant