text and photos from Mexico by Glenn Daly
crash photos courtesy of NTSB

        "The quality of mercy is not strained,

           It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

           Upon the place beneath ... ."     



                              - William Shakespeare

A gentle rain was falling from a low overcast as a 40 year old Piper Apache departed Orange County's John Wayne Airport on Friday, March 3, 1995. At the controls were the twin engined airplane's new owner, Anthony Shanks, and his friend and co- pilot, Randy Breding. Doctors George Brauel and Francis Markoe Dugan, Jr. were riding in back as passengers."

Dr. Brauel was in his last year as chief resident in the otolaryngology department at UC Irvine Medical Center. He had been making this trip, and donating his medical skills to the rural poor of Mexico, for the last three years. His enthusiasm for the work had convinced his friend, Mark Dugan, to join him. Dr. Dugan worked in facial and reconstructive plastic surgery, had an MS in anatomy, and was assistant clinical professor of head and neck surgery at UC Irvine. He and his wife, Melissa, who was then pregnant with their third child, were both afraid of small airplanes.

Pilot Anthony Shanks was a crackerjack flyer. He held a commercial license with single, multi-engine, and instrument ratings, was a certified instrument flight instructor and, in nearly 900 hours in the air, had never an accident, nor an incident, to blemish his record. Shanks' flight instructor, Kerry Lange, now a pilot with a midwestern commuter airline says, "Anthony was one of the best students I've had. He picked everything up really quickly. He was always striving to be the best, he kept current on everything, he was just a picture perfect pilot." Co-pilot Breding had 1,500 hours and was a multi-engine instructor to boot. In the five years Shanks and Breding had known each other, they had spent more hours in cockpits, together, than some married couples spend making love.

Considering their skill, knowledge and experience, it's hard to believe that they failed to arrive. Three days after their departure, their mangled bodies and the tangle of wire and aluminum that had been their airplane were discovered in a ravine at Camp Pendleton that was so inaccessible rescue workers had to rappel from a helicopter in order to remove them. The men were unpaid volunteers on a mission organized by Liga International, the Flying Doctors of Mercy. Since its inception, Liga has provided medical care to the rural poor in Mexico, and since the late 40's had flown thousands of missions, most without incident. According to Dr. Walt Cason, an anesthesiologist and Liga's past president, this was their second fatal accident. "[The first] was [in the] fall of '64," says Dr. Cason. "There were four men in a Bonanza and they were approaching to land at Hermosillo. The plane stalled and spun and crashed, and may have burned. The cause was never determined."The only [other] injury crashes both happened within the last three years," he says. "[One] was a Mooney flying recklessly [and] there were some serious injuries. That pilot was barred from flying with Liga again. There was another one at San Blas [and] there were some minor injuries."

When word of the crash circulated among Liga members, Dr. Cason says, "We were just shocked and sad about it. These were really bright young people. I went to the funeral of one of the pilots, (Anthony Shanks), and everybody just loved him. The doctors were head and neck surgeons, and they were really both stars in their field. George Brauel was single ... his girlfriend came [with us] last month. It's just a terrible tragedy."

Asked if the crash had any affect on volunteer turnout for subsequent missions, Dr. Cason says, "I think there's a number of people who have come with us because of the crash, and I rather imagine there have been some that stayed home. I heard a rumble or two that some didn't come because the crash scared them. Well, you've got to calculate those things. People ask, 'Is this going to make you quit flying?' No, it isn't." Dr Cason is no stranger to personal tragedy. He and Mary, his wife of 50 years, had a daughter who died in a car crash when she was 19. He says, "You bend your car up on the freeway, you don't quit driving. If you see a big crash there, it doesn't really change your outlook much."

Along with a bombast of negative publicity for general aviation, the crash unearthed organizations which offer volunteer-owned or operated aircraft flown for public benefit. Bill Worden flies with Angel Flight, a group that provides free air transportation to and from treatment facilities in the western states for financially distressed people or people are or unable to travel on public transportation. He's also founder and president of The Air Care Alliance, a national coalition of three dozen public benefit flying groups, all operated by volunteers, most of them private pilots - which might, perhaps, help change the perception of private pilots as just another bunch of rich, old, white guys who crave expensive toys, don't ski and can't play golf.

Worden, a mechanic and owner of a Volvo garage, talked about the Liga accident. He says, "Generally speaking, people who fly general aviation aircraft are not subjected to the tight controls and training schedules that commercial airline pilots are. As a result, they have more cause to exercise their own judgement - that's where they get into trouble. Typically, it's not being able to say 'no' to a situation. The thing with the Liga flight is they had some bad weather and they felt it was important to get where they were going, and they couldn't do it - they got caught.

Worden has spent 1,500 hours in the air and owns a 1946 Ercoupe. General aviation accidents give him the willies. "Anytime anybody gets into trouble it reflects on all of us," he says. "Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it? We're doing a seminar this year at the AOPA convention called the 'Psychology of the Mission', which tries to get inside the pilot's head when he is asked to do a volunteer flying mission. What pressures are on the pilot and what obligations does he feel he's incurred when he says he'll do it? [The mission or the weather] may be past his personal comfort level, experience level, or ability to carry out that flight. What can you do, as the organization involved, to give that pilot all the room he needs to make the decision not to go - or to make the decision to stop, or the decision to come back? It's that ability to say 'no' which is gonna save your ass, and, if you can't do that, sooner or later, you're gonna bite off the one you can't handle."

Another public benefit flying volunteer is Joe Tully, general manager of Temple Inland Food Service in El Cajon. Tully, who has flown for twenty years and has nearly 2,500 hours in the air, holds an instrument rating, with helicopter, float plane and multi-engine time. He is also a partner in a Cessna T-210, and he flies missions for both Liga and San Diego-based Mercy Outreach Surgical Team. He was scheduled to fly with Liga in May of last year, but cancelled when a problem occurred on take-off.

"There's an accumulation of negatives which lead you to a 'go' or 'no go' decision," Tully says, and because his trip wasn't essential, he decided to cancel. About another trip, which he did fly, he says, "Now, the difference is ... I had carried a load of stuff down [to a clinic in Zacatecas], and my buddy behind me had carried a load of stuff and he got as far as Guaymas. The weather turned bad and he wasn't comfortable flying, so he left his load in Guaymas. I flew from Zacatecas to Guaymas, picked up his load, returned to Zacatecas and got caught in some really nasty weather. But, there was a good reason, because without that stuff that I had in the airplane, there wasn't going to be a clinic. We had a hundred and twenty patients waiting and a staff of 34 people - that puts an entirely different complexion on a 'go/no go' decision."

Anthony Shanks and Randy Breding, confronted with a similar decision, chose to go. Why? Why would an experienced pilot risk his life, and the lives of his passengers, taking off into near- instrument weather in an airplane not certified for instrument flight? Why would he scud run beneath a deck of low cloud that dropped below the ridge tops at Camp Pendleton?

Dr. Ray Hendrickson, practicing psychologist, lawyer, Liga board member and the organization's treasurer, offers a couple of answers. "Number one," he says, "They were anxious to go on this trip because they had a mission ... to pick up two doctors whose services were needed in Mexico, so there was probably a strong motive to get there. Number two, the pilots in this airplane had the reputation for adhering to the letter of the law ... therefore, it would not have been prudent for them to file IFR, because the airplane wasn't certified - they would have been breaking an FAR ... and they felt they could fly underneath [the cloud deck]. I think the weather did get better the further south you went."

Tim Sloan was Anthony Shanks' best friend and partner in the crashed airplane. Says Sloan, "We bought this airplane to do precisely what he was doing - to fly the Liga missions and use it for something good and something fun. Anthony flew one [mission] down there already, and he had a great time. In fact, he had such a great time, he was learning Spanish." According to Sloan, Shanks had just been promoted as District Supervisor in the Sacramento Parks and Recreation Department. He was a single parent with joint custody of his son, Anthony, Jr., who found time to maintain and improve his flying skills, perform volunteer work, arrange and compose music, and play in a popular Sacramento urban music band.

About his flying, Sloan says, "He knew his regs inside and out, a typical CFII, very strong, very safety conscious - that's the reason why I'm having a hard time understanding the accident." Shanks, in fact, had been Sloan's instrument flight instructor. "I probably got twenty hours hard IMC with him - hard IMC - I mean, you might as well take a spray paint can and paint the windows white, because that's all there is there. He was very competent in that [element] and very comfortable in it. In fact, during my instrument training, that's what he insisted upon." 'We are going to fly actual IFR,' he quotes Shanks as saying, 'I am not gonna get you a sunshine IFR ticket. You're gonna fly in the real stuff and you're gonna see what it's really like and, if you do have to hold and it's zero/zero, you're not gonna care. And when you shoot your approach you're gonna feel comfortable flying it down to the minimums and landing. Cause if you're not, then you have no business being out there.'

Asked about Shanks' co-pilot on that morning, Sloan says, "I know Randy, too, and, I've flown with him. His goal was to become an airline pilot, and that's part of the reason why he was on that trip - he needed to get some hours - and, he was welcome company. Even previous to this flight, Randy and Anthony had been flying some actual IFR, together, shooting approaches in Randy's air- plane. So, they had flown together quite a bit, they each knew each other's experiences." The two pilots had flown Breding's Beech Sundowner to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and back the previous summer. Because of Breding's airline ambitions, Sloan says, "We always called him, 'Mr. Numbers.' Including volunteer work with the Yolo County Sheriff's Department, Sloan estimates that Shanks and Breding had shared three to four hundred hours of cockpit time.

Flight instructor Lange says, "I would never have guessed that he'd ever be involved in an aircraft accident. The whole thing was just ... ," he pauses, sighs, then continues, "I was really caught off guard when it happened. He was a helluva pilot and it's a tragic loss."

According to the preliminary report of the National Transportation Safety Board: " ... the flight departed the John Wayne Airport, Santa Ana, California, about 0921 hours with an intermediate destination of Brown Field ... to clear customs and then enter Mexico. ... Initial review of recorded radar data observed the airplane paralleling the coastline about 3/4 mile offshore to an area near Dana Point. The accident site is about 20 miles south of Dana Point and about 3 miles inland ... . The aircraft contacted the top of one ridge line in a canyon area, then impacted the near-vertical opposite canyon wall. ... Three other airplanes participating in the airlift departed from John Wayne Airport on the morning of the accident and all filed IFR flight plans to Brown Field. Preliminary information suggests that the aircraft was not equipped for flight in IFR conditions."

Shanks and Breding turned inland just past Dana Point and paralleled the coast line, just east of I 5. Other pilots have speculated that the men were hoping the cloud deck would lift sufficiently for them to clear the ridges, or provide a break through which they could climb and continue their trip. Sloan, familiar with the instrument layout of the cockpit, suggests that Shanks was probably working the radio, trying to contact officials at Camp Pendleton to obtain permission to fly through their air space. Unfortunately, the air traffic controller had, by mistake, provided Shanks the wrong frequency for Camp Pendleton and the transmissions made by Shanks on that frequency were never received. Although Sloan maintains that both pilots were expert map readers, they may not have been completely familiar with the terrain near San Onofre where a 1,700 foot hill rises abruptly into the sky - the only bit of rugged terrain immediately adjacent to the coast. FAA and NTSB estimates place the aircraft at between 800 and 1200 feet as it continued in a southeasterly direction, then the cloud deck and the ridges merged, and Apache N1260P hit ground.

The pilots may have seen the hillside just prior to impact because it appears that the left wing tip struck the first ridge with the aircraft in a nose-high attitude, which would indicate an attempt at a climbing left turn. Unfortunately, the contact was so severe that it ripped the left wing from the fuselage at the engine nacelle and the aircraft cartwheeled over the top and into the next ridge, then fell to the canyon floor below. When the aircraft was finally airlifted from the area, the airspeed indicator was found broken at 140 mph, the throttles at full power, another indication that the pilots had seen the mountain, applied power to climb and avoid it, but too late - they hit the first ridge only fifteen feet from its crest.

Dr. Hendrickson, a pilot for twenty years with over 4,000 hours, had flown out of John Wayne Airport earlier that morning. He says, "I met Dr. Dugan at sunrise. I had to drop a passenger off at Palm Springs and then pick up another passenger in Calexico, so I left about an hour before Shanks arrived at Orange County. I filed IFR [an Instrument Flight Rules flight plan] from Orange County to Palm Springs. Technically it was VFR at the Orange County Airport, but the problem is that you couldn't go anyplace - you could fly around the pattern, but you couldn't get to any other airports. I think the ceiling was something like 1,500 feet when I left Orange County, but obviously I couldn't get to Palm Springs flying at 1,500 feet - nor could anyone else." (The intervening terrain is substantially higher than that altitude.) "I don't know how anybody could have had the idea that they could leave Orange County and stay VFR. I've talked to other pilots who say, 'Yeah, it wouldn't have bothered me.' You could do it, and you could probably do it safely, but, whether it was a prudent thing to do ... , " his voice trails off, then he says, " ... we're second guessing."

When asked why Liga doesn't insist on formal check rides for all its pilots, Dr. Hendrickson's legal training surfaces. "Our idea is that the FAA certifies pilots. Liga has concluded that by giving pilots check rides, they would be, in fact, in some ways, certifying to their competence or their ability or capability. Inadvertently, it happens that people are checked out because they do go down in a previous trip. Certainly, if someone exhibited poor judgement, they would not be invited back to fly with Liga. By the way, if either of these two pilots had gone on a check ride, I have absolutely no doubt that they would have passed."

Asked if establishing a check ride program would expose the organization to legal problems, Dr. Hendrickson says, "It could, and it's sort of a damned if you do - damned if you don't. I mean, you're ... (he sighs, exasperated)... what do you do? Our program for increasing safety has been increased education, increased requirements. In the last four years, we have required that all the pilots have instrument ratings. We require that they have a minimum of 400 hours pilot-in-command time and that they've gone on previous trips to Mexico. So, we've increased these standards each year with the hope that it would have some effect on overall safety. I really think it has, notwithstanding the accident - and I don't think the organization can be faulted for the accident. In retrospect, it's always easy to say how an accident happened or probably happened, and, if we could predict accidents, you and I wouldn't be talking."

Liga had been sued by parties injured in the '91 crash. According to Dr. Hendrickson, Liga was, "Dismissed from the lawsuit because at that time Liga had worker's compensation covering the pilots and passengers." Asked why Liga no longer carried worker's comp, Dr. Hendrickson says, "Well, there's been a Workman's Comp crisis in California and elsewhere. I think our rates went from $9,000 to $200,000 per year, so it was just impossible for Liga to maintain insurance." One can almost hear the beat of personal injury vultures' wings, as they circle above the wreckage of this crash.

With all the legal loop-the-loops and attendant aggravation, why do people continue to volunteer their time, airplanes, money and experience in such endeavors. Bill Worden says, "I'm kindred with a lot of other people who believe that, when you learn to fly, it's a real privilege. And ... [because of] the personal fulfillment I derived from learning to fly, I felt like I owed a debt. The way I could repay the debt was to use the aircraft to do some good."

Joe Tully says, "Flying is a delight to me. You fly some long legs, and drilling holes in the sky for a couple hours at a time can be boring, but the end of the trip makes it all worthwhile." Tully's flights for Liga and Mercy Outreach take him south of the border as often as ten times a year. "I especially feel for the little kids," says Tully. "The Mexican government makes available a lot of services. The problem is access. You get a little kid that lives in Napolika, down there in the middle of nowhere, he's not going to be able to get to Guadalajara for an evaluation and then live there long enough to be put in mind for a surgical procedure. So, although the government offers those things, the delivery system makes it difficult for the indigent, and the people that live in rural areas, to avail themselves of that service. So, we actually bring the service to those areas."

Tully flies Mercy Outreach Surgical Team's two annual trips to different locations deep into mainland Mexico. Its mission differs from Liga's, says Tully, in that, "Liga's philosophy is to establish permanent clinics and to service those clinics on a monthly basis. And, so, the local folks can anticipate the arrival of the medical personnel, and you always have a line-up of people waiting for service. I would classify it as kind of family care and within the framework of that care, they identify people who require surgical intervention, and it's supplied on the spot for relatively minor procedures. More complex procedures get referred to the U.S."

Tully is particularly partial to the plastic surgery services the doctors render. "It's very gratifying," he says, "Because, [when] you get a little two year old kid with a cleft palate or lip and you fix him, you've got a seventy year cure that just keeps paying dividends all through his life. Also, in the more rural areas, there's a stigma attached to kids that have those deformities, and so you're giving them a better shot at a normal childhood. To me, the whole operation is very selfish. I take far more out of it than I put into it."

A gentle rain is falling from a low overcast on Friday morning, Cinco de Mayo, 1995. Three passengers wait by the corrugated steel door of a hanger at Riverside Airport for the arrival of Dr. Walt Cason, who is an hour late. A phone call indicated that he had worked into the wee hours and that he wouldn't arrive until past ten. When he drives up in a gray battered Datsun sedan, he bears bad news - it's a bad day to fly. The overcast appears to have settled in, and, while the weather is clear and sunny VFR throughout most of southern California and Mexico, directly above Riverside it is not.

Dr. Cason is a bear of a man, tall and athletic, with a thick head of gray hair and a full moustache. He is soft spoken, but his voice resonates deep in a barrel of a chest and commands attention. He reminds one of Ward Bond, the gruff character actor whose credits included It's a Wonderful Life and Wagon Train.

Despite the dire weather predictions, Dr. Cason rolls back his hangar door and reveals the white, with red striping, shining '68 Beechcraft Bonanza that is obviously a source of pride. No dead bugs mar the leading edges of the wings, the paint glistens even with the overcast. Dr. Cason has brought donated medicines, bags of bandages, needles and syringes. Part of the flight prep involves weighing each passenger, with baggage, to determine what will be left behind. One of the passengers is a young woman with medical aspirations who wants to witness work done by Liga's volunteers. She blanches when Dr. Cason is asked about the Bonanza's diabolical reputation.

"It's called the 'Doctor Killer'," he says, with a chuckle. "Were it not for the Bonanza, the country would be overrun by medical men." Instead of a conventional tail, the Bonanza possesses two tail surfaces in the shape of a 'v', which produces less aerodynamic drag and enables it to fly faster. Unfortunately, in earlier configurations, the 'v-tail' had an alarming tendency to fall out of the sky, usually when flown into turbulent weather. Instead of the straightforward flight path of a conventional aircraft, the 'v- tail' tends to waddle in light turbulence, fishtailing through the bumpy air much like a tadpole moving through water. There is speculation that after an hour or so of this, inexperienced pilots (like some doctors who earned enough to afford the expensive Bonanza, but hadn't time to learn proficiency) become spatially disoriented, and reaction impaired. If moderate or severe turbulence is encountered, like that found in heavy rain or near thunderstorms, control of the aircraft can be lost and, in an effort to recover, many pilots overstress the tail, causing it to sheer off.

FAA first issued warnings about the aircraft's behavior in 1957, and again in 87 and 94, ordering the tails to be strengthened, so that now the Bonanza's tail structure is far less disposed to inflight failure.

None of this, however, proved encouraging to the young medical aspirant. After some debate with her family, and covert glances skyward and at the shape of the Bonanza's tail, she decided to aviate on another day, when the weather was more favorable, or the tail more conventional.

At 11 AM, Dr. Cason calls the FAA weather briefer and is assured that the prospects are fine along the route of flight, assuming Dr. Cason can find a hole through the clouds. There have been reports of moderate turbulence and icing - not good things for small airplanes, even ones with conventional tails. Fifteen minutes later, a break appears in the overcast, and Dr. Cason decides to see if he can find a hole through the deck. He doesn't file an instrument flight plan, contacts the Riverside tower and takes off. Magically, the overcast breaks up and Dr. Cason climbs through a substantial hole into a brilliant sunwashed blue sky. There are radio reports of icing in the cloud, but he has escaped and heads south, first for the radio navigational aid at Julian, then Puerto Penasco, on the northern tip of the Sea of Cortez.

At 11,500 feet the ride is relatively smooth, but there is a tailwind quartering from the right and the Bonanza's waddle is disconcerting. Dr. Cason, accustomed to the behavior, doesn't notice, and Phyllis Nash, the O/R nurse volunteer, who regularly makes the trip, sits in the back knitting a sweater, unfazed. Dr. Cason's Bonanza has all the electronic and navigational bells and whistles: a three axis auto-pilot, Loran C, and a GPS receiver. The flight proceeds calmly, boringly, almost, except for the spectacular scenery of mainland Mexico that slips beneath the wings. The azure Sea of Cortez gives way to a sun-bleached desert; abrupt stabs of volcanic mountains are interrupted by a canyon through which a river twists like a royal blue ribbon edged in the green of its verdant banks. Two lone steel tracks snake southward, toward the crimson Copper Canyon, a minor tourist mecca.

He lands at Hermosillo, watching as an aging Mexicana 727 threads its way through a fleet of small planes, then past a sparkling ATR turboprop commuter stripped of its engines and interior - a freshly painted cannibalized carcass. It is a holiday of sorts, the one available immigracion official busy with a newly arrived Aeromexico 757, and it takes an hour before he appears, brandishing the rubber stamp wand that grants a sanctioned escape.

It is dusk before Dr. Cason circles the village square of El Fuerte, and lands on the paved, but unlighted, air strip south of town. A cab appears and the Bonanza's bounty of healing booty is transferred. Down a dirt road, the cab rolls into the rattling, cobblestoned heart of Friday night El Fuerte, named after the crumbling Spanish fortress that once guarded the river of the same name. The town is semi-famous for its Nahuatl petroglyph- adorned rocks a few miles north, across the reed-lined river which brings irrigation to the nearby cabbage fields, and sanctuary to a particularly hungry breed of insects known to the doctors as 'no-see-ums', which leave visitors scratching at exposed ankles and necks for week after their visits. Barefoot children and dust-covered anorexic mongrels play in the streets, young men with straw cowboy hats, western shirts, jeans and boots amble toward the sound of norteno music which emanates from a nearby cantina. Fanning their faces in the moist early evening heat, vigilant mothers promenade virginal daughters around the red bricked plaza under the shadow of the cathedral's thick adobe walls.

Rooms are engaged in a century-old wood and adobe hotel down the hill from the ruins of the fortress. Dark, now, the supplies are delivered to the clinic, a collection of peeling, whitewashed and red crossed buildings down a dirt residential street a half mile from the plaza. Already, there is a line of patients, even though the doctors and nurses won't arrive until eight the next morning. Attired in Sunday's best, their demure dresses and scuffed high heels dusty from their journeys, women wait with medical woes, some accompanied by children wearing what might be first communion finery. There are men waiting, too, with the ubiquitous cowboy hats and boots, but wearing, also, embroidered guyabarras and their finest polyester dress trousers, no jeans. An hour later, the queue has grown to thirty people, who smile and nod as Dr. Cason and nurse Nash pass by.

Liga was founded by Dr. Iner Ritchie in 1935. According to Dr. Cason, "There were five doctors and a dentist that started this school down near Navajoa [and] the people in the surrounding area would come in and ask for medical help. In 1947, they decided to form an organization of flyers and doctors to hold medical clinics. It started as a little Adventist group, and then some time in the 50's, it was re-chartered as purely a non-sectarian thing. As a mater of fact, three of the doctors had practiced as missionaries in Latin America, so they were mission minded. When they chartered Liga as such, it was called something like 'North American Educational and Health League'. And 'Liga' means league, in Spanish."

Among the tasks Liga's doctors perform are outpatient surgeries: hernias, minor tumor removals, etc. They also specialize in plastic surgery - cleft lips and palates, and club feet - and eye surgery, having removed thousands of cataracts. "We bring a lot of patients to the States," says Dr. Cason, "The serious stuff: heart surgery and like that, or serious deformities in kids. Both eye and plastic surgery lends itself well to our work because most of it we can do, and send [the patients] home [afterwards]. If we have to keep someone over night, the Social Security Hospital will take them and keep them until they're ready - they've been very good about this. A group from Las Vegas, two months ago, brought down equipment to do laparoscopic gall bladders - it's a relatively new procedure where they do the gall bladder through a scope and it just makes about two or three little puncture wounds, so those patients get up and go home afterwards. They do that at the Social Security Hospital and the local doctors have lined up a bunch of patients for them. Of course, the Mexicans have never seen that before, and they're rather excited about it."

In the morning, another two hundred people have joined the line, which now winds around the examination rooms and drug dispensary. Terry Driver, the clinic coordinator, and her assistants, nurses, lay people and interpreters, begin to chronicle their maladies. It's called triage and the word recalls frantic, bleeding memo- ries from M * A * S * H. Here there is no haste. The scorching sun climbs ineluctably higher, a mountain jay shrieks, a mangy perro skulks nearby begging handouts, a vendor hustles cokes, fifty cents for gringoes, a few pesos for those seeking care. Patients are sorted, charted, categorized. Some have travelled hundreds of kilometers, some live miles from any secondary road which might lead to a main highway, from which they take those aging, fume spewing buses that still litter Mexican highways. Some are in need of pain pills for arthritis, some will see the acupuncturist, others the surgeon.

By 10 AM the operating room is organized, triage identifying four hernia cases that are in need of surgery. Larry Wallington, wiry and spry in his early seventies, has sorted through the files and organized the plan of his surgeries, and, begowned, becapped and bemasked, is helped into his surgical gloves. Dr. Cason has arranged his equipment at the head of the operating table and Phyllis Nash has directed a new nurse in local procedures. Dr. Wallington's first surgery is on 3 year old Almanidia Ibara, who is literally tongue tied, which drastically impedes her ability to speak or swallow. It's a simple procedure to clip and stitch her frenulum and Almanidia is off the table in half an hour. The next is a hernia patient, a woman in her thirties. After she is disrobed, draped and anesthetized, Dr. Wallington opens an incision and moans. The woman has two hernias, both of which had been operated at another time in another place, and Dr. Wallington has to remove layers of scar tissue before he can begin to repair the damage. Blood-soaked sponges drop onto a towel on the floor at the foot of the operating table as Dr. Wallington and Nurse Nash labor. Commingling with the antiseptic scents of the O/R is the fetid aroma that emanates from within a body, something wet, warm and bacteria-bearing that is exposed to air for the first time. The surgery seems endless, the woman on the table over four hours. When she recovers from the anesthesia, she somehow manages to retain her dignity, despite lying naked, but for a sheet, in a room filled with strangers babbling a foreign tongue.

The day wears on, grows hotter still, the O/R odors mixing now with the perspiration of close work. El Fuerte lies fifty miles east of the Sea of Cortez, two hundred fifty miles north of Mazatlan. In early May, the mercury skies into the high 90's and the river, which gives life to the valley, provides enough humidity to torture those unaccustomed to the tropics. By afternoon, the triage line has wound down, those remaining the family members of surgery candidates or recoverees. Barbara Black, an ICU nurse from LA, had flown down this month because of the crash. She had heard about Liga last year, wanted to help but never had time. When the crash occurred she vowed 'no more excuses' and was able to come in May. John Giles, general manager of an LA area plumbing manufacturer, spent his day counting sponges and needles, running the autoclave, sterilizing instruments. Giles originally came because he loves to fly, and Mexico has some of the "best VFR flying in the world. But, after a while," he says, "You get to know the people and want to help."

Diana Rey, office manager for her father's LA paving firm, was deeply affected by the crash. Her 28 year old daughter, Oriana, had once been engaged to marry Dr. George Brauel. "We knew him as Greg," says Diana, a mother of three, the youngest a 17 year old boy. "Greg and Oriana met in 1990 and they got engaged in '93, but it only lasted six months after the engagement." Diana and Dr. Brauel remained friends and sometimes he would mention the work he did with Liga. "He would casually talk to us about it, but we never really knew how strong or how involved [he was] and how big a heart he had.'

She had wanted to fly a Liga mission two years earlier, but, because of other time demands, she put it off. "When Greg died," she says, "It inspired me and ... I called Liga and they said, 'We need interpreters.' And that's how I got involved." "The closer I got to it, and the more I thought about the plane ... I would remember Greg and what had happened ... wow, you know, and ... I did feel a sense of fear ... but once I got to the airport, and got into the plane, it all went away. It was all worth it."

She mentions the long hours that the volunteers put in. "Those people were tired," she says, "Just like the doctor (Larry Wallington). He was pooped. Everyone was tired. But nobody talked about it. We just kept going and going and going. I would go outside and look at these people and they were sitting there since one, two, three, four o'clock in the morning waiting, and you could see it in their eyes - talk about tolerance and patience and hope."

Dressed in blue scrubs, Diana relates a conversation with a patient to whom she had shown a picture of George Brauel. "She said, `Oh, my God, I remember [him]'. She had goose bumps on her arms. She said, `May he rest in peace. He did such wonderful work here for us.' And a lot of people had tears in their eyes when we talked about Greg."

Diana worked the triage, and tallied two hundred forty patients who were either treated by the doctors, or the acupuncturist, or were provided with medication. After her triage chores ended, Diana spent the afternoon and evening talking surgery patients through their recoveries. From them she learned that, "There was no one at the [local] hospitals that would give them the attention. Maybe it was an operation that they couldn't get at the Social Security Hospital," Segura Social she says in Spanish. "They would just turn them away, or they would not give them an answer. So they would never get what they needed. "Two or three people told me the same story, that they trusted these doctors, that they come all the time ... especially `Doctor Larry' - he's popular with everyone. That last patient and her husband came on the bus, two hours, and then they had to walk from the terminal to the hospital and waited. She hadn't eaten all day and all night for that."

Doctor Wallington lies on an operating table, sneaking cat naps between surgeries. When he awakens, he removes a small lump from the abdomen of a six year old boy, who gamely carries on with a local anesthesia. Then, Fernando, a fortyish man is brought in, smiling, muscled, a healthy looking specimen. His surgery lasts two hours and he quickly claims the prize as the day's biggest pain in the ass. Moaning in the recovery room, unable to sit up without grimaces and groans, he destroys whatever macho image he had. An hour after the anesthesia has worn off, he finally struggles into a wheel chair, whining, and is pushed out into the night.

The last surgery involves a Yacqui Indian grandmother, Guadalupe. When she recovers, she is stoic and accepting, nodding at everyone, doctors and nurses, who return her greetings. When her daughter is allowed into the room, Guadalupe surges into a wide-eyed wail, sobs uncontrollably about what these people have done to her, the pain and humiliation they have caused her. Her daughter suffers it for fifteen minutes, Guadalupe refusing to be comforted, bemoaning her desperate fate. As soon as the daughter leaves to inquire about overnight accommodations at the clinic, Guadalupe's mask reappears like a privacy curtain whisked around a bed: the tears dry, instantly, and the stoic nods return. It is past eleven when the surgeries are done, the implements cleaned, sterilized and stored away. The doctors have eaten two quesadillas for lunch, consumed fruit drinks and wolfed cold carne asada tacos for a late supper. They drag themselves back to the hotel, Dr. Cason opting for a quick swim, dodging patrons of the hotel's 'Disco Palace' who mill about the pool between sets.

Back in the room he unwinds by talking about the days efforts. "There wasn't as much action in the operating room, this time," he says. "Usually we have at least two different tables going, maybe one general and one plastic, or one general and one eye. A month or two ago we had eye surgery, plastic surgery and general surgery all going on at the same time. The other clinics were busy though. It just happened that we were light on the surgery in [El Fuerte]."

He rises again at 7 AM to meet with Terry Driver and the President of the local Cruz Roja who wishes to thank him for his efforts. It is 10 AM before Dr. Cason engages the starter on the Bonanza to begin the return trip - made longer this time because the tailwind enjoyed on the trip down had become a twenty-five knot headwind. It adds an hour to the flying time and delays arrival in Riverside until late afternoon, which comes at the end of a half hour, waddling, lurching descent through thick cloud and rain and a bumpy ILS approach onto a rain slicked runway.

Over a year has passed. Liga continues to fly missions - more hernias have been healed and hundreds of cataracts have been cured, restoring vision to viejos who had given up hope of ever seeing their grandchildren.

The first lawsuits have been filed, naming Liga, the estate of pilot Shanks and partner Tim Sloan. Attorney Paul Hedlund represented two of the parties injured in the Liga crash in 1991. An aviation law specialist for fifteen years, Hedlund says that in the cases of Dr's. Brauel and Dugan, just beginning their careers, with earning power of about $500,000 per year and thirty years of work ahead of them, a good lawyer would expect to ask a jury to award the families upwards of $10,000,000.

Liga has an annual budget of $200,000, no insurance and virtually no assets. Pilots Shanks and Breding were both employees of the city of Sacramento, working in their spare time as flight instructors. Shanks left his son, Anthony, Jr. and a girlfriend. Randy Breding was the father of a newborn and his widow was forced to short sell their home and move back to Pittsburgh, where they had family. Where the money might come from is anyone's guess.

Tim Sloan settled with the insurance company to pay off the loan on N1260P. He says it sits in "four neat bundles at Allied Storage in Long Beach," awaiting the final disposition of the case. Reflecting on the crash, Sloan says, "Even up until that day, I would have had no qualms about sticking all five of my kids in the airplane with him in bad weather." When asked why they had not had the aircraft certified for IFR operations, Sloan says, "We just got the airplane." Then he sighs. Did the certification required a lot of time or money? Sloan sighs again, then he says, "No ... not particularly. No, it's just ... we were gonna get all this done at the next annual. But, you know ... ," he pauses, his voice cracking, and a palpable charge passes over the telephone line. Tim Sloan had just stated the human reason for which his friend and three others lost their lives: We were gonna get all this done at the next annual. "... you know ... ," he says with exasperation, " ... I think if I'd have been in that situation ... I would have just confessed and climbed," - confessed to air traffic control that he was flying a non-IFR certified aircraft, climbed to a safe altitude and taken the penalty.

If Shanks and Breding had climbed and then been discovered, Sloan says that the FAA's penalty would have amounted to, "Not much ... they have to catch you first ... ," he laughs a rueful laugh, then says, " ... [and] the only way they catch you is if you crash." He laughs again, at the monumental absurdity of this. "I'm sorry," he says, apologizing, perhaps to his questioner, or his friend, or his conscience.

Off the record, an FAA official said that the penalty for operating a non-IFR certified airplane into IFR weather would depend on circumstances. If the pilot had a clean record and no one was severely injured in the crash (virtually the only way the FAA would have found out), the penalty might have been revocation of flying privileges for as little as two months, or as many as twenty-four. An A & P (Airframe and Powerplant) mechanic at a local repair facility estimated that the cost of an IFR certification inspection, one without any problems, was about one hundred and fifty dollars, and might take three hours to per- form.

Dr. Ray Hendrickson says, "Accidents, unfortunately, happen and sometimes we never know [why]. By the same token, we can always, with 20/20 hindsight, figure out how they could have been avoided. We've suffered tremendous grief in the organization because of the loss. Our grief cannot approach the grief of the families, but we can and we do share it." About the Dugan and Brauel family litigation, he says, "There's just no amount of money that can ever restore a person to life, and there isn't anything that can ameliorate the hardship they've suffered and will continue to suffer.