"The Defense Is Not Ironclad"

It certainly isn't, as "pot planes"enter U.S. airspace undetected

One afternoon last week a crew of Colombians began loading bales of unlabeled cargo into a four-engine DC-7 at Curac,ao airport in the Dutch Antilles. That night the lumbering 22-year-old plane took off for what the crew said was a local test run to tune up its engines.

Instead the ancient Douglas headed north over the Gulf of Mexico, flying through the night with no approved flight plan or warning lights and maintaining radio silence. Neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) picked it up on radar as it flew low into dense fog over Louisiana. The foreign invaders might have escaped detection altogether but for the fact that their plane lost power and crash-landed in the trees near Farmerville, just south of the Arkansas-Louisiana border.

Their illicit cargo--ten tons of marijuana, worth $22 million in street sales --apparently saved three of the four smugglers. On impact the burlap bags slammed forward into the cockpit, broke open and literally popped the surviving crew members out of the plane as it disintegrated and burned. Said a Union Parish sheriffs deputy: "Those guys are lucky to be alive, and thanks to the pot they are. But they're sure going to get to know our jail real well." They face up to ten years for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. The fourth crew member was thought to be buried under the cargo.

The undetected flight into the U.S. of a plane carrying Colombian marijuana or cocaine is a dramatic but far from unusual event. "Several hundred come in every day," says Tom Stuckey, an FAA official in Louisiana. Most flights from Colombia are bound for Florida and Georgia; a DC-7 with twelve tons of marijuana was discovered at an airfield in Georgia last spring. Countless other "pot planes" take off from Mexico for the deserts of the Southwest, where the Drug Enforcement Administration has found more than 40 small aircraft abandoned this year. The trafficking is a high-profit operation: a single ten-ton marijuana flight can mean $2 million for the smuggler.

Even more disturbing in some quarters than the magnitude of the marijuana traffic is the fact that a plane as large as a DC-7 can penetrate the U.S. from the south totally undetected by military air-defense systems. Concedes NORAD's Del Kindschi: "The defense is not ironclad. It's possible for a single low-flying aircraft to fly under our radar capabilities." NORAD is developing an "over-the-horizon" radar with greater capability for spotting low planes but, for general operational use, the system may be years away. Radar beamed from sophisticated AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes is already highly effective at detecting ground-hugging aircraft. But it would take a huge and prohibitively expensive fleet of such planes to make the U.S. invulnerable.

In the meantime, officials express some concern about the southern border--the relatively soft underbelly of U.S. air defense. In 1971 a group of Cubans, using a low-flying, Soviet-built transport, dropped in unannounced at New Orleans airport for a sugar conference; in 1972 a Cuban defector flew his air force plane undetected to Miami. The U.S. keeps its intelligence eyes focused mainly on northern approaches where, it is assumed, there is the greatest threat of an attack. .

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