[hharney]

Here is just a taste of the dynamic keynote speaker, Thomas Van Horn, scheduled for the 2008 SOAPA meeting in Kalamazoo next week. You can still register to come because you won't want to miss this great event. If you are close enough to KZoo and can come over for just the Friday night banquet please do join us at 6:00 PM Friday night at the Kalamazoo Air Museum "The AirZoo".


In the early afternoon hours of February 24th, 1996, three civilian, unarmed, twin-engine Cessna 337 aircraft from the group Brothers to the Rescue were flying what should have been just another search and rescue mission in international airspace off the coast of Cuba. It was a volunteer, humanitarian operation that had begun in 1991 and had averaged 450 flights a year. It was also a mission that had saved the lives of over 17,000 Cuban refugees, the so-called balseros or the Cuban rafters.



For years, the balseros had slipped away in the dead of night aboard tiny, makeshift rafts, rowing to liberty from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. It was a journey three out of four did not survive. Between Cuba and the United States, over 20,000 rafters have died trying to make it across to freedom in the USA. And for many years, their best hope was to be found by the Skymasters flown by the pilots of Brothers to the Rescue. For the Cessna 337, the mission of search and rescue over the Straits of Florida is probably the airplane’s finest hour, closely rivaled perhaps only by its extraordinary record as a Forward Air Controller over Vietnam.



That February day, however, no lives would be saved. Instead, Cuban Air Force MiGs shot two of the group’s Skymaster aircraft from the sky, killing four Americans. A third Brothers to the Rescue Skymaster, with four people aboard, fled northward and somehow escaped, despite being chased by two other Cuban MiG-23 fighters.



Many who watched the news of the day’s events unfold on CNN were shocked to see the video of a black smoke trail from the mid-air explosion of one of the planes, filmed by a tourist on board the cruise ship, Majesty of the Seas. On the decks of the ship people had been sunning themselves and enjoying afternoon cocktails in their deck chairs, and were now all unwitting witnesses to death.



The fiery wreckage of one plane crashed a few hundred yards from a small American fishing boat, Tri-Liner, whose captain quickly turned to search the last bits of wreckage on the sea for any survivors; then he watched as the other plane was struck by a missile and exploded nearby.



Yet the full story of what happened that day not only cost the lives of four Americans and the loss of two airplanes – it involved a tale of intrigue, at the highest levels of the governments on both sides of the Straits of Florida, and a ring of Cuban spies who had infiltrated not only Miami’s Cuban exile community, but even into the heart of the Defense Intelligence Agency where skewed intelligence reports carefully manipulated U.S. policies to Cuba’s benefit and, ultimately, set the stage for the shoot down itself.



Speaker Thomas Van Hare, a former SAR pilot with Brothers to the Rescue and its one-time director of operations, takes you from the pilot’s last meal in their hanger to their final seconds aloft. He dissects ten years of data from media coverage, court transcripts and testimony that bear witness to the infiltration by Cuban spies of U.S. military installations, the Brother’s flight organization and more – as new information is made available and released with every passing year.



Van Hare describes the inner workings of the Clinton Administration, as officials wrestled with the knowledge of what was coming in the days leading up to the shoot down – and yet issued no warning – a story that seems so incredible that it seems impossible, except that every conclusion is backed up by meticulous research, sworn testimony, radar plots and official records. He takes you behind the scenes into the planning of the shoot down itself and into the heart of Clinton Administration, detailing who knew, when they knew and what they knew at each critical juncture of the story, leading them to a choice that ultimately would be betrayal, death and a cover-up that has lasted 12 years.