Source:SAA crew bailed out?

S.African Airways crew bailed after new Heathrow drugs find
British customs officials said Tuesday they had released the crew of a South African Airways plane on bail, after arresting them and seizing cocaine worth 250,000 pounds on a flight from Johannesburg.

The 15-person crew were detained Monday evening after five kilogrammes (11 pounds) of cocaine, worth 350,000 dollars (280,000 euros) was seized -- the second timein four weeks that one of the airline's flight crews has been detained following the discovery of drugs coming into Heathrow.

The nine men and six women were released later Monday evening after having been interviewed by customs investigators, and told to return to Heathrow Police Station in April, said a customs spokesman.

Another spokesman had said Monday that they were arrested after UK Border Agency officers discovered the drugs in an item of baggage that had arrived on a South African Airways flight from Johannesburg.

He told AFP it was "very, very unusual" for two separate crews to be arrested in such similar circumstances within such a short period of time, adding: "We were surprised to find another (haul)."

In January, 10 female and five male SAA crew members were arrested after 50 kilos of cannabis, with a street value of about 150,000 pounds, and four kilos of cocaine, worth about 160,000 pounds, were found in three suitcases.

They were not charged and were released on bail, to report back to the authorities at Heathrow on March 23.

South African media later reported that police there had arrested a security guard and a SAA cabin crew member in connection with the case.

SAA said at the time that it had a "zero tolerance approach towards the use of the airline's services for any criminal activity."

Airline crew are subject to the same security checks as ordinary passengers in both Britain and South Africa.

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I am flying to Jo'burg in late March '09 on SAA.
I guess my question is this: Are these crew members dopers? or mules?

. . . just wondering up here in WV

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to report back to the authorities at Heathrow on March 23.

I am sure they will show up!

Gee. What a novel idea. Smuggling dope on an international airline.

I read a news story in this weeks issue of Aviation Week that sure painted a sorry picture of SAA.
Sounds like SAA is bad from the top down.

I wouldn't fly them, but not because a couple of people are involved in muling a couple of kilos of dope.

That's a common occurrence in Miami, with dozens of aircraft coming up from the south day and night

A few years ago, we hauled a load of flowers out of Bogota on our regular five-night-a-week rose run. The Feds were all over us when we arrived in Miami. They'd received a tip that there was dope on the airplane. They found nothing.

Meanwhile, another carrier had also brought in a load of flowers. They were barely inspected and their cargo was loaded onto a semi. About a mile outside the airport gate, the semi got hijacked. The load was obviously in the flowers from another carrier.

The stuff going on at SAA is small time crap. You have to have lived in Miami during the late 70's and early to mid-80's to have seen what real smuggling operations were like.

I still wouldn't get on SAA, though. If it got panned in Aviation Week, that's good enough for me. That's the best trade publication in aviation and they are very, very rarely wrong.

The Feds used to call them "Aviation Leak" because they published information more than once that the Feds wanted kept secret. Their reputation, unlike SAA's, is impeccible.