[Washington Examiner] CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas ‐ Smugglers flying small cocaine-packed airplanes toward the United States from South and Central America might make it to Mexico thinking they went undetected by American forces staked out in international waters trying to interdict them.But once on the ground in Mexico, from where they hope to smuggle their contraband into the United States, those tiny planes will be greeted by a swarm of Mexican law enforcement. What’s more, they will never know a Department of Homeland Security plane was flying within 100 feet of them, quietly tailing them over the Eastern Pacific or Western Caribbean and then tipping off Mexican authorities.
"Even this airplane weighing 100,000 pounds ‐ we can sneak up behind them and they won’t see us. And with the sensors we have on the airplane, a lot of times we don’t even have to get that close," said Dan Jordan, a supervisory air interdiction agent for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations.
Jordan, who is based out of Corpus Christi, was standing in the cockpit of the Lockheed P-3 Orion as we soared through the air over the Gulf of Mexico on our way to do a few practice "interceptions" of planes flying as fast as 300 miles an hour.
It was terrifying and thrilling as our 117-foot-long plane came within 50 feet of another just like it, all while zooming through the sky.