A private plane loaded with 26 suitcases of cocaine, weighing more than 1500 pounds. Sounds like a plot point in a Hollywood heist movie, but it really happened in 2013.
When the stash was discovered in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, on a plane bound for France, the pilots Pascal Fauret and Bruno Odos were taken into custody. Then, in another plot twist straight out of a movie, they escaped to their native France via boat in 2015. The two pilots were convicted in a 2019 trial and sentenced to six years in prison, but they appealed the verdict, and were ultimately acquitted in 2021.
Now the pilots appear in a new Netflix docu-series Cocaine Air, out June 11. The main question in the legal proceedings was whether they were supposed to check the contents of the 26 suitcases. In the series, Fauret and Odos defend themselves, saying that they couldn’t possibly have known about the contents of the suitcases, while Christine Saunier Ruellan, who spearheaded the investigation of the case in France, explains what she sees as suspicious activity in the walk-up to the 2013 flight.
Here’s how Cocaine Air presents both sides of the case.
Pilots seen as heroes
Both pilots described the shock of being detained in the Dominican Republic. Odos describes the rollercoaster of emotions he was feeling in the moment: “When you’re innocent, you almost turn yourself in. It’s like a way to say—okay, please help me.”
In France, both pilots were seen as national heroes because they served in the French army, transporting nuclear weapons before moving into commercial aviation. They garnered a lot of support from people who couldn’t imagine that French army veterans would be capable of participating in drug trafficking, and they are seen throughout the series holding up messages of support outside the buildings where legal proceedings took place.
Cocaine Air co-director Jérôme Pierrat explains that the pilots’ defense lawyers successfully compared pilots to taxi drivers, arguing, “Just as taxi drivers do not have to check your suitcase as it goes in the trunk, it’s the same for them [the pilots].”
The pilot’s lawyers made the case that the contents of suitcases is the responsibility of border control offices and that pilots are not supposed to be asking passengers what is in their suitcases.
As Fauret put it himself in the doc, “they tell me the date, and I fly. I never know the purpose of the trip.”
The series also features the owner of the plane, eyeglasses magnate Alain Afflelou. Afflelou leased the plane to another agency when he wasn’t using it, so he was never linked directly to the infamous flight.
An investigator sees red flags
As the series shows, the investigation by Christine Saunier-Ruellan focused on why three flights were flown with the same pilots and the same passenger. On the March 2013 flight that resulted in the pilots’ arrest, the manager and stewardess were told that the client did not need her services—
Through intercepting the pilots’ devices, she found what she thought were suspicious messages sent by the pilots, from “nature of cargo confirmed” and “we did what we had to do.” Saunier-Ruellan also discovered Internet searches on Fauret’s personal computer that were about the drug trafficking situation in Ecuador and the penalties.
She questioned if these were all signs that the pilots knew that cocaine was in the 26 suitcases, but no definitive link could be made between the messages and behaviors and the luggage. “The appeals court considered these arguments solid enough to overturn the conviction,” says Olivier Bouchara, Cocaine Air co-director.
At one point, she even went so far as to bug former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s phone because he had flown that airline in the past. But he had nothing to do with the plane full of cocaine and appears in Cocaine Air to set the record straight on any misconceptions.
“In the case of the two pilots, she didn’t have direct proof,” Bouchara says. “What she had were indications, or circumstantial evidence.”
Yet even after spending months immersing themselves in the details of this case, the filmmakers are also not convinced that they know everything about the pilots’ role in the scandal. As Bouchara put it, “Jerome and I were wondering during all of the shooting, are they responsible? And I have to say that we don’t have the final answer.”
Bouchara stresses that he and Pierrat were not jurors, or judges, but journalists: “Sometimes, we’d be shooting a scene and we’d look at each other and think, ‘Wait, maybe they knew. Maybe they were in on it.’ Other times, we’d come across a detail that made us doubt everything again. And that’s part of what we wanted to share: not a verdict, but a conversation.”
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