Fly By Night

These are stories of America’s drug smuggling pilots and the people who chased them; stories of conspiracy, dangerous flying, of greed, adventure and murder. Told through interviews with flyers who chose to use their skills to move contraband into the United States, and through the perspective of law enforcement agents of the DEA, FBI and others who worked to catch them. Season One begins with the four-part tale of a crooked cop and pilot who created one of the country’s biggest aerial smuggling operations, and then parachuted to his death loaded down with cocaine and weapons. Fly By Night is a production of Midnight Flyer Media.

In the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, a group of Southern Californians turned to smuggling to finance and build a counter culture community. But they hadn’t started out as enlightened hippies. Before one long strange night of transformation, they had been petty criminals, more interested in stealing than in peace and love. After their 180 degree change, they became known as the “Brotherhood of Eternal Love” and were known for selling hash from Afghanistan, and for practically giving away hundreds of thousands of tabs of “Orange Sunshine” LSD, even dropping thousands of tabs from a Cessna flying over a festival. They had communal homes in California and later in Hawaii, and in the waning years of the Brotherhood’s smuggling operations, that’s where DEA Agent Kelly Snyder first encountered a pilot named Randy Garrett. By coincidence, their paths would later cross in Louisville, Kentucky, and their story has an unusual end. The second story in this episode is that of Wally Thrasher of Virginia, a charismatic pilot whose skills were much in demand, and who was living a good life until everything came apart when someone else crashed a plane he owned, and law enforcement agents began to close in on him. Thrasher’s attempts to recover from the loss of a great deal of money and drugs that burned in the crash would led to his own mysterious disappearance, with theories of his death in another crash, possible murder, and even a well-financed change of identity and a life on the run.

To tell his story, we have a special guest presenter, three-time national aerobatic champion and member of the National Aviation Hall of Fame, Patty Wagstaff.