Crashing a plane full of cocaine into the ocean sounds insane until you price the plane against what was inside it.
A used DC-3, the workhorse of that run, cost about $150,000. It carried roughly three tons of cocaine. At the start of the 1980s a kilo wholesaled for $40,000 to $50,000 in Miami. One load was worth north of $120 million.
Run the ratio. The entire airplane was worth about four kilos out of the three thousand it was hauling. Sinking it cost them one-tenth of one percent of the cargo.
Once the plane is that cheap, ditching it is the smartest move on the board.
Landing solved nothing. South Bimini's airstrip was watched, closed at sunset, and had a single road in. Put the plane down intact and you still own the most traceable object in the whole operation: a tail number the DEA could walk straight back to whoever bought it. Smugglers got so paranoid about this they ran Convairs with duplicate tail numbers, swapping a "derelict" decoy for the loaded one in the dark.
Ditching erased that the moment it touched down. The plane slides into thirty feet of gin-clear water, a flotilla of cigarette boats strips the bales off the wing before it settles, and the one thing that could convict anyone becomes a reef.
The drugs floated. The receipt sank.
That's why the seabed off Bimini is still littered with airframes. Each one was a $150,000 line item on a $120 million delivery. The cheapest part of the whole operation was the part they were happy to throw away.
Matt Damon says Miami drug smugglers used to crash planes into the ocean on purpose
"Bimini's like the closest, it's 50 miles off the coast of Florida, they would come in with a plane full of drugs and just crash the plane into the water"
"they would land it on purpose because there's no runway on Bimini, they would have 10 cigarette boats... like a flotilla of boats waiting"
"they'd offload the drugs as the plane was sinking"
"the planes are still all submerged... the water's so clear you can see how many fucking planes are out there"