On Thu, 03 Aug 2006 05:53:54 -0400, Cub Driver usenet AT danford DOT
net wrote:
I saw it and found it rather irritating. "The Americans" might shoot
her down! Of course she knew perfectly well that "the Americans" would
never shoot her down, which is why she dared enter Afghani airspace
from Iran in her Colt. Then she's talking to the AWACS plane (or so
she identifies it) but her interlocutor is clearly German, not
American! Perhaps a Dane can't tell the difference in accents, but the
British? producers of the program most certainly could have.


I can't guess whether she knew "perfectly well that the Americans
would never shoot her down" but I can tell you that a lot of people
who flew in that part of the world during that time walked very
quietly and gave no lip.

I've spent almost two years in Afghanistan, first as an adviser to the
NATO/ISAF military command, and then with the United Nations warlord
army disarmament programme (ANBP). There are very few places I
haven't been to in the country.

What she did in ignoring the military controller was foolhardy to the
extreme, if not personally irresponsible, and she did indeed risk at
least an interception.

At the time this documentary was shot (Dec 2002 I believe) all of the
airspace in Afghanistan was under Coalition control and next to
nothing civilian was allowed in or through.

She would have been aware of the fatal bombing of Canadian troops by a
US air force aircraft just a little ways south near Kandahar. And
she, like just about everyone else in central Asia and the gulf, would
have remembered the missile shootdown by the USS Vincennes of the
Iranian Airbus with total loss of life in 1988 while on a flight from
Iran to Dubai.

It's a guess what she was thinking, but I'd bet money she seriously
weighed the real chance of running into hard trouble with the military
controllers.

But by entering from the west at Herat and then heading through the
Hindu Kush to Kabul she would have been transiting the most peaceful
part of Afghanistan. Had she done the sane thing and headed south to
Kandahar and then northeast to Kabul to bypass the mountains I'll bet
she would have been met by some armed coalition soldiers on her first
landing. The south is, and was, a seething hotbed of trouble and the
military traffic in the region can be very high. No one would have
cut her slack there.

It's doubtful too that anyone would bother too much about a piston
powered fabric aircraft gasping its cylinders out as it staggered at
altitude at less than a hundred knots. The Colt would have seemed so
fragile and non threatening that the controllers might have turned
down the radar gain to avoid microwaving the occupants to death.
Seriously though, the controllers would have quickly determined that
this craft was not a threat to anyone other than the occupants.

It's not surprising that the controller spoke in German. Many
Americans speak more than one language. And at the time, the German
military was leading the International Stability Assistance Force in
Afghanistan and no doubt had its own people working alongside the
coalition controllers.

I have far bigger problems with her story than flouting the wishes of
the coalition controllers.

Central Afghanistan is easily the most vicious terrain I've ever flown
over. There are mountain peaks of up to 20 thousand feet, steep
twisting valleys, very few plateaus, and winter weather more savage
than the arctic. The number of places where you might possibly
survive a forced landing between Herat and Kabul . . . well I don't
know of any.

Why anyone would take a Colt into a high altitude environment with no
chance of surviving a forced landing, no nav-aids, no search and
rescue system, using fuel of dubious quality, and during the Afghan
winter is, well, it's insanity that's what it is.

She was damned lucky too in her dealings with Afghan bureaucracy.
After a generation of Soviet bureaucratic training, followed by zero
latitude Taliban bureaucratic systems, it's a wonder sometimes that
anything can get done.

In Herat and Kabul she seemed to have sailed through the formalities
with astonishing ease. I suppose that a lot of the arguing, pleading,
negotiating, and bribing that would have been necessary was left on
the cutting room floor but still, she could easily have lost her
aircraft and ended up in an Afghan jail. I am surprised she didn't.
I suspect that the Danish embassy might have been called in to help.

I just did not like the whole flight of an angel to save one child
theme to the program. It seemed arrogant in the highest to blame the
poor girl for not seizing this Danish borne golden opportunity. "Do
you know how many people I've had to deal with, how much money I've
spent, how much time I've had to. . .etc etc" or words to that effect
when she lectures the girl for not showing up for the helicopter
flight. Nobody asked the poor girl if she wanted this intervention.

And I don't necessarily buy the conclusion that the girl was the
victim of conservative cultural values. She just might never have had
a serious ambition to be a pilot in the first place and the sick
inducing flight in the Colt killed what little there was.

The family didn't appear to fit the conservative mode in Afghanistan.
They lived in the Mikroyan apartment complex near the airport and
while it doesn't look that great by North American standards it is
very much upper middle class in Kabul. The furnishings and the
clothes indicated that someone in the family was either senior level
government or a professional. People and families of that background
in Afghanistan are unlikely to ascribe to Taliban like insanities
about women.

I'm glad I watched it because I was able to recognize several friends
and acquaintances among the Afghans in Herat (the guy demanding 200$)
and Kabul (the air force Colonel and the General with the female
helicopter pilots), but I believe it to be a dishonest documentary
project and a dubious record of a flying achievement.



Rick Grant
Calgary