The Flight and Crash of "Blackwater 61"

This story was originally published on Feb. 21, 2010. It was updated on June 24, 2010.

More than 5,000 American servicemen and women have now died in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 20 percent of those deaths have occurred under what the military calls "non-hostile circumstances."

We are going to tell you about three of those deaths. They occurred when a small turboprop plane with the call sign "Blackwater 61" slammed into a mountain in Afghanistan. The flight was operated by Presidential Airways, the aviation arm of Blackwater, the private military firm.

It was operating under a government contract to haul troops, mail and supplies to remote landing strips. The crash was barely noted except for the fact that one of the passengers was Lieutenant Colonel Mike McMahon, at the time the highest ranking soldier to die in the war.

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But as we reported last February, 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 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.

"Yeah, with this good visibility, it's easy as pie," the captain, Noel English, could be heard saying on the recording.

The tape has never been made public.

McMahon said she had never heard the actual voice transmission, but told Kroft she wanted to hear it.

"I swear to God they wouldn't pay me if they knew how much fun this was," Captain English said on the recording.

English and his co-captain, Butch Hammer, had only been in Afghanistan for 13 days, and neither one of them had ever flown the route between Bagram and Farah. And their inexperience showed: they didn't file a flight plan, and instead of taking the easier route to the southwest with lower mountains, they set off to the north and never seemed to get their bearings.

"I hope I'm going in the right valley," English said on the voice recording.

Flight mechanic Mel Rowe voiced his concern early on. "I don't know what we're going to see, we don't normally go this route," Rowe said.

"Bingo! 'We don't normally go this route,'" Jeanette McMahon reacted, listening to the tape.

To make matters worse, the Blackwater operations center in Bagram didn't have the equipment necessary to track the flight. So once it left the air base, the company had no idea where its plane was. But the crew seemed unperturbed.

"You're an X-wing fighter. Star Wars man," co-Captain Butch Hammer said to Noel English.

"Damn right. This is fun," English replied.

Twenty five minutes into the flight, McMahon recognized her husband's voice, from the back of the plane.

"You guys heading to Farah first?" McMahon could be heard asking.

The reply from the cockpit? "Yeah."

"I mean, he seems to be saying…," Kroft remarked.

"Just double checking again," Jeanette McMahon said.

"Yeah, it doesn't look familiar," Kroft remarked.

Ten minutes before the crash, the pilots were flying down the wide Bamian Valley, discussing what kind of music they wanted to pipe into their headsets.

"Philip Glass or something suitably New Agey," English said.

"No, we gotta have 'Butt Rock,' that's the only way to go. 'Quiet Riot.' 'Twisted Sister,'" Hammer suggested.

Jeanette McMahon, an Army aviator, could only shake her head. "When are they gonna start paying attention to where they're going?" she asked.

If the crew had just continued in the valley for a while longer they could have easily crossed over to Farah at a very comfortable altitude. But for some inexplicable reason the pilot turned to the left towards one of the tallest mountain ranges in Afghanistan in an unpressurized plane not known for its climbing ability.

"Well, let's kind of look and see if we've got anywhere we can pick our way through. Doesn't really matter it's gonna spit us out down at the bottom anyway," English could be heard saying.

Blackwater 61 tried to wind its way through a box canyon with steep mountains on both sides, and the terrain rose faster than the plane could climb.

"Come on, baby. Come on, baby, you can make it," English said in the cockpit recording.

"Okay, you guys are gonna make this right?" flight mechanic Mel Rowe asked.

"Yeah, I'm hoping," English replied.

A buzzer similar to a stall warning went off in the cockpit indicating the plane didn't have enough lift.

"Got a way out?" Rowe asked.

"We can do a 180 up in here," English replied.

"Yeah, you need to, ah, make a decision," Rowe said.

They waited another 30 seconds before the pilot tried unsuccessfully to turn the plane around.

"We're going down," Rowe could be heard saying.

Listening to the end of the recording and what presumably was the sound of the aircraft's impact, McMahon told Kroft "Shouldn't have happened. They waited too long. And they had no clue."

"They headed for the tallest mountain around. I don't get it," Kevin McBride, who was a Blackwater pilot in Afghanistan, told Kroft.

McBride had flown to Farah many times and he said he wouldn't have taken that route. "You don't fly up a box canyon that rises rapidly into a huge mountain. That's just, you know, aviation 101," he said.

And because Blackwater was unable to track the flight, and didn't have anyone on the ground in Farah, it took them five hours to discover that their plane was missing. And only then, because a sergeant waiting to be picked up by Blackwater 61 at the desolate airstrip notified his superiors that the plane was hours overdue.

"Right away we're thinking, 'Well, geez, they must have got shot down or had an engine failure or something.' And I had no idea and neither did anyone else," McBride recalled.

It was mid afternoon before search and rescue teams were in the air but they didn't know where to look. They covered the more logical southern route to no avail. It wasn't until the next morning that a weak homing signal was picked up by a military plane west of Bagram and the wreckage was spotted, a tiny dot in the snow at the top of a massive mountain range.

But bad weather set in and it took recovery teams two more days to reach the site. Battling thin air and sub zero temperatures, they recovered six bodies. Five of the men, including Lt. Colonel McMahon, had died instantly. But inside the fuselage, they found the body of Army Specialist Harley Miller, stretched out on his sleeping bag. Air Force parajumper Miguel Folch was one of the first to see him.

"We were like, 'Man, looks like this guy could have survived," Folch recalled.

Asked what position Spc. Miller was in, Folch said, "He had his hands around his head. Like, you know, using it as a pillow."

Folch said Miller wasn't in a crash position.

They also found cigarette butts and urine stains in the snow, more indications that Miller had been alive and walking around on the mountain.

After the flag-draped coffins arrived at Dover Air Force Base, autopsies were conducted. Dr. Todd Burd was part of the investigative team.

In Dr. Burd's mind, there is no doubt Miller had survived the crash initially.

Asked how long Miller survived on the mountain, Burd said, "Total survival was probably about eight to ten hours, although he would not have been fully conscious for near that long of time."

"If he'd been rescued during that period, do you think he could've survived?" Kroft asked.

"Yes, he could, could've survived.

But since no one knew where the plane was the day it crashed, any chance of saving Miller was lost. He is survived by his wife and a son.

Jeanette McMahon says that she and the other widows probably would never have filed the lawsuit if Blackwater or its aviation wing had shown some remorse.

McMahon told Kroft no one from Blackwater ever called her to express their condolences. "Never. They took absolutely no responsibility. I mean, if they had come out with open arms and said, 'We are responsible. We are so sorry.' That point never really came across," she said.

"Did anybody with the Army come and say, 'Look, we really don't want you to file this lawsuit?'" Kroft asked.

"No. It was a personal decision. I do my lawsuit in my civilian clothes and then I go to work in my uniform," she replied.

Asked if she thinks Blackwater underestimated her, McMahon said, "I think so…."

Neither Blackwater nor Presidential Airways would give us an interview. But court records show they tried to get the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that they were part of the military and immunized from civil lawsuits.

They also claimed there was no actual proof of what caused the crash, and even asked that the case be tried under Islamic law because the crash occurred in Afghanistan.

Under Islamic law companies are not liable for the actions of their employees.

"Yeah, that's almost funny. You know, so am I supposed to go put on a burqa? You know, that's ridiculous," McMahon commented.

Even though a military investigation and a National Transportation Safety Board report faulted Blackwater's flight operations and its pilots for flying recklessly and behaving unprofessionally, Presidential Airways chief Richard Pere tried to lay some of the blame on Lt. Colonel McMahon, saying in a videotaped deposition that McMahon had told the pilots to take the route that they did.

"Something changed them to make them go to the north, sir," Pere said.

Asked when, Pere said, "It took place after Lt. Colonel McMahon got on board that aircraft."

But Blackwater pilot Kevin McBride remembers Pere telling him a much different story not long after the crash.

"Richard Pere pulled me into his office. He says, 'Have you seen the cockpit voice recording transcript?' I said, 'No.' He says, 'You can't believe it. These guys are talking about X-Wing Star Wars fighters and this and that. They were just having a good old time, and they flew into the *** mountain.' That's what he told me," McBride told Kroft.

"Why do you think he was telling you that?" Kroft asked.

"I don't think he could believe it himself," McBride replied.

After the crash, Blackwater aviation was suspended for a month, but it went on to win another $92 million contract from the Pentagon in 2007 to expand its operations out of Bagram.

Flight tracking devices were added to the planes and at least one experienced crew member must now be in the cockpit. American troops continue to fly on Blackwater's planes every day, just as Lt. Colonel Mike McMahon did five years ago, trying to get back to his troops for battles ahead.

He's buried on Fiddlers Green at West Point, mourned by three sons and one very determined widow.

"There were safeguards that could've been put in place that would've kept this from happening. And in my opinion that's negligence," McMahon told Kroft. "It happened to happen when it did. And unfortunately, it happened to my loved one. But it was gonna happen eventually."

Since we first reported this story, the military contractor reached an out-of-court settlement with Jeanette McMahon and the two other Army widows.

The terms have not been disclosed, but the offer was made after we taped the interview with McMahon and after we requested interviews with Blackwater and Presidential Airways.

Produced by Draggan Mihailovich