HAZMAT, that is; Freight Pilot Indicted For Undeclared Material

Ever take a flight you regretted? Harold DeGregory of West Palm Beach, Florida sure has. The 58-year-old pilot delivered some cargo from the Ft Lauderdale Executive airport to the Bahamas, in November, 2004, and it could land him in the Federal pen.

DeGregory's not accused of shipping drugs, as one might think, but something just as closely watched by the authorities: radioactive material. In this case, he had a 42-lb container of Iridium-192 which was being used in a radiographic inspection camera to inspect structural steel. (Most of the weight of the container was its shielding, ,the quantity of Iridium-192 was quite small).

The Bahamas Oil Refining Company, end user of the material, acquired it legally in the USA and hired DeGregory to deliver it to and from their job site in Freeport, on Grand Bahama Island.

Every part of the deal was legal and above-board, except that Degregory's company, H&G Import Export of Fort Lauderdale, never acquired proper HAZMAT certification for its twin-engine propeller aircraft or its Part 135 operation. And never filed appropriate HAZMAT documents on the material it hauled. So it isn't the hazardous nature of the material per se, but the lack of proper HAZMAT paperwork, that threatens DeGregory's liberty.

Authorities have tried to imply that DeGregory was trying to sneak the material in, using the terms "secreted in a wing compartment of his aircraft," to describe stowage in the nacelle locker of his airplane, which is a customary feature of light and medium twins.

The eight-count indictment charges DeGregory not with smuggling the material, but with conspiracy to do so (an easier charge for the prosecutor) -- one count for each time he planned to bring the material to the Bahamas, and back.

But DeGregory's attorney, Ed O'Donnell, told the Miami Herald that DeGregory merely committed a minor technical violation. O'Donnell stressed that DeGregory was not involved in any misuse of the industrial isotope.

Harold DeGregory's entry in the FAA Airmen Database contains something we've never seen before, a red-lettered instruction to call Airmen Certification directly for information on his certificate. The FAA office was closed when we looked him up, but he does (did?) have a commercial certificate and an A&P certificate, and his medical was current at the time of his last Iridium flight (November 2, 2004).

Radiation is a scary word, but the industrial applications of Iridium-192 show the extent to which the physical phenomenon of ionizing radiation has been tamed and put to good use by mankind.

According to the website of the National Health Museum, Iridium-192 is used "to test the integrity of pipeline welds, boilers and aircraft parts." For radiography, discs or 1.5mm x 1.5mm pellets of Iridium-192 (natural Iridium which has had an extra neutron forced into the nucleus) are welded into a stainless-steel container.

Iridium-192 is a gamma ray emitter with a half life of 73.8 days. It does release sufficient ionizing radiation to be a threat to human health, if removed from its normal travel packaging (such as the depleted uranium "pigs" in which DeGregory transported the material).

In 2003, a Chinese scientist, Gu Juming, was sentenced to death for planting a large quantity of bare Iridium-192 pellets in the ceiling of a rival's lab, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison. Juming had obtained the material by purchasing a welding-inspection machine with forged paperwork, and tearing the machine down.

Under the inscrutable Chinese penal code, Gu Juming, who tried to poison someone with Iridium-192, can be paroled in only two years, assuming good behavior in custody. That's shorter than the 40-year maximum penalty DeGregory faces, for bringing equipment back and forth between two legitimate ends of the same company, but not doing the paperwork.

American prosecutors have sent a message: if you want to handle, or mishandle, Iridium-192, best bet is to do it in Communist China.

DeGregory is free, for the time being, on $50,000 bond. If he is convicted on all counts and gets the maximum sentence (an unlikely event), he'll be 98 when he is released.

FMI: http://asi.faa.gov/Hazmat.asp