U.S. Identified Baptists' Plane as Drug Carrier The United States Customs Service flies surveillance planes into what it calls the "source zone" for drugs, but a spokesman, Dennis Murphy, said today that his agency's planes were not involved in tracking the missionaries' plane on Friday. A Customs Service radar plane based in the Caribbean was flying in Colombia on Friday, but it was far north of the path taken by the Cessna 185 and did not observe it, Mr. Murphy said. The Customs Service has a P-3, a four-engine turboprop, the same kind of plane that the Navy uses to track enemy submarines, based in the Caribbean. Normal practice for the Customs Service is that once a radar plane locates a suspicious plane in flight, it radios for a Citation, a smaller plane that can fly at low speeds, to observe the target visually. Both the radar plane and the observation plane carry a representative from the host country, said Mr. Murphy, who communicates directly with the air force of the country involved. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/world/22PLAN.html?pagewanted=all