assumed they picked up their criminal payload in the UK
Port of Antwerp has a quite strong reputation as a point of entry for certain stuff from Latin America. And in Rotterdam they claim (often quite correctly) they do everything bigger than Antwerp…
They picked EHTE as their alternate because the sentences for drug trafficking are much lower in The Netherlands :-)
I guess that there could be an International Arrest Warrant to face a Conspiracy charge in the UK, though.
After all, it looks like the UK was the target victim.
Timothy wrote:
After all, it looks like the UK was the target victim.
They will claim that they simply made a navigational error and turned back as soon they noticed they had flown to the wrong country… it was neeeever their intention to deliver aaaanything to the UK. And anyway, their flight was just a technical demonstration of the loading capacity of their aeroplane and for ballast they simply took those two suitcases which had been abandoned in the corner of their hangar for so long that nobody even remembers how they got there.
The Judiciary tend to be drawn from the more intelligent echelons of society. They are far from the idiots that some crims hope 
I am sure that that is just as true in The Netherlands and Germany as it is in the UK.
FR24 shows an earlier flight to the UK with the same aircraft. Usually the police let one transport through in order to gather evidence.
There is a lot of class A drugs smuggling going on between NL and the UK…
A guy that I know quite well (he was an active member on a Pilot forum in the Netherlands) was caught with 22kg cocaine at Rochester Airport.
Just a couple of weeks ago there was an attempt to smuggle £1.4m worth of cocaine from NL to the UK via Biggin Hill.
There’s also this recent case where they tried to smuggle more than 100kg into the UK with a helicopter
The Dutch Border Police now has started a campaign called Eyes & Ears to enlists the help of citizens in order to fight criminal activity around the General Aviation airports.
Yes, the previous flight was to Booker/Wycombe Air Park.
Comparing the two flights, and knowing LTMA, the second flight could have had the same destination, though there are plenty of other possibilities.
Timothy wrote:
The Judiciary tend to be drawn from the more intelligent echelons of society.
This is why the real good lawyers can get you out of almost everything… (I don’t have the greatest faith in this system).
lenthamen wrote:
FR24 shows an earlier flight to the UK …
I wonder why they didn’t bother to leave traces of their flights like that. If there has ever been a reason for turning one’s transponder off than this.
They were flying airways so would need to have transponder on, no?
A DA42 with transponder off would be awfully suspicious, so probably they wanted to appear as normal as possible.
But, who would know it is a DA42? Certainly not from the speed of it.
