How a small plane, once used by Argentine military to throw citizens to their death, was later found in U.S.

Every once in a while we come across a story so extraordinary that it resists belief. Tonight, the saga of an airplane that doubled as an instrument of murder. During Argentina’s ruthless dictatorship in the mid 70s, the Skyvan PA-51 was used to throw victims alive into the Atlantic ocean, to quote unquote “disappear” thousands of innocent citizens seen as a threat to the state. Those disappeared were meant never to reappear. Forty years after the end of the dictatorship, many of its crimes remain unsolved and unresolved. When an unlikely pair of investigators went looking for the death plane, their search for truth uncovered state secrets, damning evidence and a reminder of a dark period that echoes into the present. 

It was, quite literally, a vehicle for evil. This British-made Skyvan, now 50 years old, is grounded for good here at the former Navy School of Mechanics, or ESMA, in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. The facility is now a museum and a memorial to the 30,000 citizens tortured and murdered during the dictatorship. This was a death camp looming large in the middle of a thrumming city. Images of the victims adorn the walls—most were students, dissidents, and union members, never charged with a crime. This plane, where many of them met their death, would have been lost in the contrails of history, had it not been for an Italian documentary photographer, Giancarlo Ceraudo. 

Jon Wertheim: Why was it important, not just to return this plane to Argentina, but here to ESMA?

Giancarlo Ceraudo: It’s very important for the memory for– for the next generation. This is real. This is an evidence. This was an instrument of death but now is a witness.

The cockpit, just as it was when the military pilots flew their clandestine death missions — flying far enough over the Atlantic so the bodies wouldn’t likely be recovered, and then dumping the victims out alive. To climb inside the plane is to experience an unmistakable chill of the past. Giancarlo grew up loving planes, but this flying coffin ended that romance.

Jon Wertheim: You’re emotional seeing this.

Giancarlo Ceraudo: Si, very emotional, very emotional.

How did a young Italian photographer—armed only with a camera, an eye for detail and burning curiosity—come to unravel one of the great national shames of Argentina? It all began in 2003, when Ceraudo was in Buenos Aires working on a project about the disappeared. He heard about the death flights in the 1970s, but the stories were never fully told. So many unanswered questions. And so little accountability. If there were flights, he reasoned, then surely there were planes and there were pilots. So where were they?

Jon Wertheim: You knew those death flights existed. How did you start your search for the planes?

Giancarlo Ceraudo: I had an idea but– to start the investigation– started with Miriam.

Miriam is Miriam Lewin. She was a young student activist in 1977 when she was kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused. She was then taken to ESMA and was among the few who survived, though she never knew quite why. Later, she became a leading investigative journalist in Argentina, best known for unearthing the crimes of the dictatorship. When Ceraudo first contacted Miriam she told him she had other things on her mind.

Miriam Lewin: And I said, “Look, we were looking for the Desaparecidos, the missing people. And then we started looking for the bodies. So we have plenty to think about.”

Jon Wertheim: People, not things.

Miriam Lewin: Yeah. And he said, “I come from a different culture. In Rome, when they are digging a tunnel to extend the subway lines, they find a plate or a sculpture and they stop everything for, like, three years,” right?

Jon Wertheim: He comes from a culture where objects are– are witnesses to history, and that hadn’t occurred to anyone here?

Miriam Lewin: Yeah.

Giancarlo’s passion paired with Miriam’s reporting chops, and her own experience at ESMA. She’d seen other prisoners taken to the basement, and given what they were told was a vaccine. Only years later did she learn that it was a sedative, and that those drugged prisoners were put on board planes, flown over the ocean, stripped of their clothes before being flung to their deaths. 

Jon Wertheim: Dumping prisoners out of an airplane 10,000 feet above an ocean seems so extreme. Why would a military resort to this?

Miriam Lewin: Death flights allowed them to disappeared the bodies of the disappeared. No trail, no clues whatsoever that could incriminate them. 

Miriam and Giancarlo began their search, poring over military records, hunting down sources and combing the Internet. They discovered that in the 1970s, the Argentine military purchased five Skyvans, workhorses used for transporting cargo, troops and… 

Skyvan Commercial: Leading parachutists of many nations have dropped from Skyvan, and they are unanimous that there’s not another jump platform like it.

Two of the fleet were shot down by the British during the Falklands War. Argentina’s surrender in that conflict ended the dictatorship in 1983. The rest were sold off. They tracked one plane to the United States, where it was being used for skydiving excursions. 

Miriam Lewin: Maybe the owners didn’t know about the terrible, obscure– past of these planes.

In 2008, Miriam and Giancarlo found the plane in Fort Lauderdale and later paid it a visit. To their surprise, the owner provided them with all the technical logs, detailing every journey the plane had ever flown. 

Miriam Lewin: I was very, very excited. I– I couldn’t believe that. I couldn’t believe it. 

They brought the logs back to Argentina and asked for help deciphering the technicalities, but even decades after the dictatorship ended, there was still lingering paranoia. Aviation experts didn’t want to talk.

Miriam Lewin: What they said, “No, no. No way. They could kill me.”

But they were nothing if not persistent. They tracked down a source who explained the highly suspicious journeys occurring Wednesday nights tracing a route over the middle of the ocean — the departure and arrival points the same.

Miriam Lewin: When he looks at them and goes, “Oh gosh. This is gold.”

Jon Wertheim: Why did he say that?

Miriam Lewin: This is the first time that death flights could be documented and proven.

Finding the logs was one thing, but Miriam and Giancarlo were determined to solve one of the most notorious and heinous abductions of the dictatorship. Every week, the mothers of the disappeared marched in the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Presidential Palace, demanding to know the fate of their missing sons and daughters. The mothers became the most potent symbol of resistance against the dictatorship, and soon they became targets themselves.

In December 1977, a group of 12 mothers and their supporters, including two French nuns, were meeting here at the Holy Cross Church in Buenos Aires when they were hauled away and taken to ESMA. They were seen by fellow prisoners being tortured, and then never seen again. Azucena Villaflor was one of the mothers. She had been searching in vain for her son who had disappeared. Cecilia de Vincenti is her daughter.

Jon Wertheim: As the days turned into months, turned into years, what did you think had happened?

Cecilia de Vincenti (in Spanish/English Translation): In reality, we didn’t know what happened. Every single day we thought she was coming back: New Year’s, Mother’s Day. Every day we lived like this.

What Cecilia and the other victims’ families didn’t know: in the days after those kidnapped were last seen, a rare storm washed up six bodies some 220 miles from Buenos Aires. Authorities in the nearby town secretly buried the remains in unmarked graves and a local doctor issued death certificates, noting the bodies had suffered multiple blunt force traumas.

Jon Wertheim: What did that mean?

Miriam Lewin: This means that they were compatible with– those bodies– having fallen from height.

In the years after democracy was restored, forensic anthropologists began unearthing evidence of the dictatorship’s crimes. In 2005, bodies in the cemetery were exhumed, and identified. Five were victims of the Holy Cross kidnapping. Azucena Villafor was one of them. 

Jon Wertheim: The ultimate purpose of these death flights was to– to disappear the victims– and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Your– your mother did not disappear, did she?

Cecilia de Vincenti (in Spanish/English Translation): The mothers and the nuns fought death just as they fought when they were looking for their children. The ocean brought them back as proof that the military was trying to disappear them. 

Miriam and Giancarlo began building a timeline for the days after the 12 were kidnapped from the Holy Cross church. And there it was in the logs: a three-hour flight over the Atlantic the night of Dec. 14, 1977. What’s more, the log contained the names of the pilots.

Giancarlo Ceraudo: I think this plane is a gift, yes. From the sky.

For Miriam, the hard-boiled investigative journalist, this was the jackpot.

Miriam Lewin: I thought that no one– would deny what happened back then. Seeing that proof, seeing that horrible proof of a group of women being thrown alive into the ocean, being mothers and nuns, right? Innocent people, completely innocent people.

The pilots of those death flights? They were hiding in plain sight. It was a glimpse into the banality of evil.

Two of them were flying international commercial routes for Argentina’s state airline. 

Miriam and Giancarlo’s investigation figured prominently in the largest and perhaps most sensational trial in the country’s history. In 2017—decades after the fact—an Argentine court convicted 48 people linked to ESMA for crimes against humanity. The pilots who flew the Skyvan PA-51 death flights, were sentenced to life in prison.

For Miriam and Giancarlo there was one last assignment: bringing the Skyvan back from the United States to Argentina, where it would be a source of truth, irrefutable evidence of the horrors of the past. 

Miriam Lewin: Questioning, denying, or even vindicating what happened in those years will lead us into darkness again. We always said, “never again.” 

So it was, on a misty morning in June 2023, the Skyvan PA-51 arrived at its final destination. Giancarlo was there taking the last pictures of this personal odyssey, this 20-year investigation. The families and friends of the victims were there as well. 

Miriam Lewin: You have to consider that I could have been a passenger of one of those flights. So– I always ask myself– why I survived?

Jon Wertheim: I wonder if this investigation helped provide an answer?

Miriam Lewin: Yes. Now I know definitely that there was a goal. There was a purpose of my survival. To get justice.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon. Field producer, Dawn Makinson. Associate producers, Nadim Roberts and Elizabeth Germino. Broadcast associates: Mimi Lamarre and Jane Greeley. Edited by Daniel J. Glucksman.

Jon Wertheim

L. Jon Wertheim is an accomplished journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent.