Flying the Unfriendly Skies

Buried in the jungle-covered Honduran mountains ten miles north of the Salvadoran border, the refugee camp at Colomoncagua is not exactly on the beaten track. But in recent months, as the population of Salvadoran refugees has grown to more than 8,000, it has become an obligatory stop for visiting U.S. Congressmen wanting to see how U.S. aid is being administered there. So when a delegation from the Senate Budget and Appropriations committees arrived in Honduras last Wednesday, the camp was naturally on their itinerary. Senators J. Bennett Johnston (D., La.) and Lawton Chiles (D., Fla.), seven other passengers and six crew members boarded two unarmed UH-1H helicopters at a Honduran air force base; Johnston and Chiles rode in the same vehicle. But as they approached Colomoncagua, their carefully scripted tour rapidly went awry.

Hovering 1,000 ft. in the air, the first helicopter took gunfire. "It was like gravel raining on a pan," said Johnston. The pilot tried to maneuver away from the barrage, but could not. One bullet destroyed the helicopter radio. Another tore through the floor and exited through the roof, narrowly missing Chiles and clipping one of the rotor blades. Since the gunfire made an immediate landing impossible, the pilot carefully veered the crippled helicopter back to an army base. The second helicopter had also come under fire, but was not hit.

Salvadoran rebels immediately took responsibility for the gunfire. The two helicopters, they claimed, were on a reconnaissance mission and had violated airspace in the border region they control. Chiles later said that the helicopter may have flown too close to the border and may even have crossed to the Salvadoran side. But State Department officials were convinced that the aircraft never left Honduras. The helicopters were too far from the border, they maintained, to be reached by gunfire from the Salvadoran side. The State Department's conclusion: the shots came from the Salvadoran guerrillas, all right, but they must have been inside Honduran territory.

In a similar incident last week along the West German-Czechoslovak border, U.S. officials were less confident. A U.S. Army HueyCobra on an observation mission there was the target of rocket and cannon fire from a MiG warplane of "unknown nationality."