How to track & trace Narco planes
By: Techjournalist, B.H.
Tags: Investigative Journalism, Data Science, Osint, Drugs, Open Source

Are there patterns traffickers follow?

Typical patterns traffickers follow is to fly at low altitude and abandon their plane after landing. Crashing usually means detection and when an accident happens the crew often takes off into the jungle with what they can carry. Often, whoever flies the plane happens to be a freelancer, Narco News writes.

Other sources claim that often pilots of these planes are being generously compensated, 50,000$ source for the WP story claims. That’s because crashes occur so frequently. One plane crashed into a getaway vehicle parked next to the clandestine airstrip.

How easy is it to purchase a plane that could be used for drug trafficking?

In 2018, a local Miami news outlet reported on the increasing appetite of traffickers to buy planes in the US. Drug traffickers purchased a Cessna to transport loot and equipment between appointments. Some of the traffickers were killed after landing on a tiny Honduran airstrip in a village called Las Marías.

True, planes found generally suit a budget buyer, crashed planes are mostly smaller planes. In the US and elsewhere, such planes can be purchased at public trading sites. One of such sites is Trade-a-Plane. One of the patterns we saw is that often planes become narco-planes at the end of their lifetime. That’s when the planes are the cheapest and most disposable, making it less costly to leave the plane on a run-way.

Many of the smaller planes include old Cessna models. In general, these are commonly available types which are now around 30–40 years old, H I Sutton writes in his excellent OSINT blog in July (worth checking out).

Such planes usually cost less than $100,000. A few of them (at the time of writing) are sold for around 15,000. One is a Cessna 150F with around 4,586 TT is on the market for £15,000 (see image )— a photo shows its registration id, which we can check on FAA records. The plane type can fly long enough to bring drug cargo across country borders.

Often planes appear to be bought second hand on the cheap in shady deals and then used a couple of times until they get caught.

Which jets are most popular for larger trafficking operations in South America? Some think that it’s the HS-125 (British Aerospace 125), a plane type a bit more common than the Gulfstream model. They may be flown from Venezuela or Colombia, north to Belize, Guatemala or Southern Mexico, and there is still a vibrant second-hand market for the type in the US. Below you see a typical private offer for such a type of plane on Trade-a-plane.

In the case of successful drug delivery, traffickers know that the profit from it easily offsets the cost of such a 30-year-old plane. One of the best examples is when in late October the Mexican military ceased a similar plane that carried $72m worth in cocaine (a similar shipment, this time drugs worth $141m, was confiscated only a month earlier). No one knows where the plane departed from.

On offer: a turbine plane on a second-hand plane trading site

What does it take to buy a plane? Not much, especially smaller ultralight aircraft are easy to get. They used to be very popular. Hard to detect via radar, quiet to avoid attracting attention and easily blending into the background when flown over the US-Mexican border, they seem ideal for it. One report from a few years ago claims that these ultralight aircraft offer a relatively cheap and fast alternative to traffic up to 250-pound drug loads over the border with little risk of detection by US Border Patrol.

For trafficking large amounts from South America, such smaller models are not useful. But, it turns out, it’s relatively easy to buy even the larger types. At least in the US, that is. One employee at Eagle Support Corporatio, a Miami based company, sold a plane a few years ago that then went to a Venezuelan firm. In a newspaper interview from 2018, the source explains why buying and selling planes is so simple. Listen to this:

Even under American law, “to buy an aircraft doesn’t require a lot of screening,” Carlos Vasquez, an Eagle employee say. “It’s really hard for us to spot who is who,” he says, adding the traffickers “build shell companies” or use intermediaries to create an air of legitimacy. Lawyers, escrow accounts, and corporate anonymity make it difficult for brokers to know exactly who their customers are (quote from Miami New Times article, 2018)

An employee of another company, Skyline Enterprises, said that once a plane goes to a buyer overseas “you could turn around and give it to your cousin… It’s kind of hard to track.” (None of these companies were held accountable for any wrongdoing).

In short, even if you find the owner of a plane that classified as a narco-trafficking vehicle, an intentionally opaque network of shell companies and oblivious aviation firms that sell the planes and who might claim to have ‘no idea they’re aiding drug traffickers’, make it all hard to catch are responsible. Authorities lack the power to stop the deals from commencing. And that’s where the regulators must come in. Planes should not be able to be sold when the destination of the user isn't clear or questionable.

Routes

One often-referenced route these smaller planes take is from western Venezuela up over the Caribbean to Central America (H I Sutton). We will take a look at small clandestine air trips in those and other parts of the continent.

If we can find the places where these crashed narco-planes were discovered, we can define patterns for conditions — e.g. on what surfaces and locations traffickers tend to land or what behavior planes tend to display. One pattern we noticed is that traffickers often, just before leaving, torch their plane. They manage that often shortly before the police arrive. In one instance in 2011, a police car crashed into a wing with their car to stop traffickers to take off.

Video of a police car crashing into the wing of a narco plane to avoid it to take off in Brazil (via @fabiomb)

Last year, a plane was found in the Barinas state, in Venezuela. Some sources online pointed at corruption and how it may play a role in narco planes crashes. If plane operators don't pay up, the Venezuelan government might intervene. SOUTHCOM, a consultancy, thinks that corruption plays a major part and that Venezuelan forces do frequently destroy narco planes because these didn't pay ‘the tax’.

Clandestine landings: A study of airstrips

AirFacts discuses the issue of airstrips in 2019

DIY/makeshift clandestine airstrips help drug traffickers to move drugs in and out of location across South America swiftly and efficiently. They are essentially the cornerstone of narco air freight and pillar to the value chain from the ground up. Reason enough to study them more closely.

There could be thousands of them that drug traffickers use to get to and fro hot spots of drug production. One report put the number of clandestine airstrips used by the Sinaloa Cartel at 4,771.

These airstrips are in plain sight. They range in size, some are around 500m long and some are more than 1 km long. The trend towards larger turbine engine planes, a development which we discussed earlier, may have contributed to longer and more built-out strips — though, as H I Sutton points out, Gulfstream business jets have proven they can be flown from relatively austere, clandestine airstrips.