HELICOPTER SCHOOL LOOKS AT CRIMINAL RECORD CHECKS

Several Pilots Have Used Their Skills To Smuggle Drugs Across The Border

A Kelowna helicopter school is considering criminal record checks on
potential students after a recent trainee pleaded guilty in the U.S.
to using his new skill for cross-border drug smuggling.

Johannes Vates, chief flight instructor at Okanagan Mountain
Helicopters, said the school already does in-person interviews before
accepting new students.

He said there was nothing amiss about Jeremy Snow, a quiet, polite
student who completed about 80 hours of training before disappearing
in March without completing the program.

The next thing Vates heard was that Snow, 29, had been nabbed after
flying a helicopter full of drugs into the U.S. He pleaded guilty in
Seattle last month and is due to be sentenced in October.

"Unfortunately you are dealing with individuals, so you cannot make a
good judgment call 100 per cent of the time," Vates said Tuesday. "We
are thinking about maybe requesting a criminal record check, so
that's a thought that we had because it came up twice now. So that is
one option."

A helicopter found near Peachland in 2006 -- and part of a smuggling
investigation -- was also linked to one of his former students, Vates said.

B.C. drug smugglers caught in the U.S. have used several schools
across the province to get their training.

One of the co-conspirators in the Snow case, Sam Brown, trained at
Abbotsford's Chinook Helicopters, owner Cathy Press confirmed Tuesday.

Press said she has had a few students over the years subsequently
charged in cross-border drug cases.

But she said there is little that schools can do to prevent someone
from misusing their training.

"For example, Sam Brown, I would have had no idea he was even
thinking about it. He was a normal student and he had a job lined up
after he was finished," Press said. "And I bet none of the other
students would have known, either.

"This is the thing. You can't always sort of pick people."

Last February, Brown was arrested near Spokane after landing a
helicopter loaded with pot and ecstasy in the woods. Four days later,
the popular 24-year-old hanged himself with bedsheets in the Spokane
County jail.

Press said it is impossible to know if helicopter pilots are being
recruited by drug smugglers or whether smugglers are signing up for
flying lessons.

"Some of the people have been seemingly very legitimate, including
having funding from the Canadian government to do their course," she
said. "How at the school would you be able to tell?"

Police tend to visit after a student's arrest, not before.

"It is always after the fact," she said.

Some of those training have told her they have been asked to make drug runs.

"Many of the guys have told me that at the bar they have been
approached, that kind of thing. Money makes the world go around for
people," Press said.

She thinks there is less helicopter drug-smuggling than a couple of
years ago because of high-profile cross-border investigations like
Operation Frozen Timber and Blade Runner, the probe that netted Snow and Brown.

"In the Lower Mainland it has really cooled off. If anything, it is
more in the Okanagan and that is what the police are kind of
watching," she said. "We are actually very heavily monitored. Even
our aircraft, we get regularly intercepted if we get close to the border."

Mischa Gelb, president of B.C. Helicopters in Langley, said flight
training schools can't really do much to screen students.

"These guys are not going to make it known that that's what they are
going to do," Gelb said. "As far as we've ever seen in the past,
there is no way for us to predict it and no way for us to stop it either."

Before Gelb took over B.C. Helicopters several years ago, the eldest
of Abbotsford's notorious Bacon brothers took flight training with the company.

Jonathan Bacon was learning to fly in the months before a young woman
was killed in a helicopter crash on an Abbotsford field leased by
Bacon as a helicopter pad.

"I do know that at some point he had done some training with us,"
Gelb said of Bacon. "But I don't know the details."

Dustin Haugen was taking off from the leased pad in March 2005 when
the helicopter crashed, killing his girlfriend Christina Alexander.

Haugen was later convicted in Operation Frozen Timber.