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Cashill is, indeed, a professional conspiracy theorist. Ron Brown was as crooked as eighty miles of Bosnian backroads, but his death was all but inevitable -- the aircrew was attempting to make an instrument approach without the proper instruments. That is a rare killer of military pilots, but a pretty common cause of crashes overall. There were many factors that contributed to this crash, but almost all of them were under the control of the Air Force unit and crew that flew the mission.

Before anyone gets too excited about Brown's death, they need to read the 51-3 on the mishap (or the extracts from it available in about three or four books for aviators and crash investigators, not stuff written by laymen for laymen). I can explain what happened for the technically savvy. (In brief: They were flying an approach that required two separate ADFs -- a common panel set-up in Third Worldian machinery, but not in USAF jets. One ADF tuned to one NDB gave them the course to fly, and the second ADF tuned to another beacon told them when to go missed. Without ADF #2 they never executed a missed approach and CFIT'd instead).

NDB approaches are difficult and seldom practiced by US-based pilots or major airline pilots elsewhere (a bungled NDB approach causes about one airline crash every three years or so). Most large airports have superior blind-landing equipment (indeed, even Dubrovnik had better stuff, but it got ripped off or destroyed during the Balkan wars) so flying the ancient NDB is a dying art.

There were organizational issues also. The whole wing flying that mission was screwed up, and the crew was terminally screwed up (literally). They paid with their lives, as did Brown and the members of the trade delegation (who had paid big bucks to fly with him). The commanders who had can-do'd the unit into exhaustion (a not uncommon outcome in Clinton years) were all sacked, IIRC.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F