abstract:The death flights () were a form of forced disappearance routinely practiced during the Argentine "Dirty War", begun by Admiral Luis María Mendía. Victims of death flights were first drugged into a stupor, hustled aboard fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters, stripped naked and pushed into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean to drown.
For the first time in Argentina, the pilots of those "death flights" are on trial, among them former naval lieutenant Julio Poch, who was extradited to Argentina from Spain in 2010 after allegedly confessing to the part he played to colleagues at the Dutch airline Transavia.