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Korin Anderson

Associate Producer, NGT

Wow, I know that Mexico is another country,–Mexicans eat different food, wear different clothes and speak a different language-- but I am still impressed with how a just crossing a tiny, man-made border line can change the world. Nogales, Mexico even smells different than Nogales, Arizona--I think it might be that they cook their foods in a different kind of oil than we do. And oh, how good that food tastes! I am delighting in the crazy little road-side taco stands, and the street vendors selling tasty treats through the car windows. I am again thankful that my mom insisted that I learn Spanish because it is infinitely more fun to be able to understand all (okay, some) of the street noise. We drove for about three hours this morning and arrived in a dusty little town. Franc introduced us to the local priest who takes care of the permanent population as well as the countless migrants who pass through Altar each month. The padre took us on a back door tour of the town introducing us to both the seedy side, and the parish grandmothers. We met the local prostitutes, the backpack sellers, volunteers who run the local shelter, a fantastic restaurant and a newlywed couple who had just opened a breakfast burrito shop. There was a strange feeling of hospitality and hostility throughout the town. Although we are here on a non-threatening mission of merely documenting what is going on, we are clearly and obviously outsiders. It is going to take some time to build trust. And many people in the town have good reason to be suspicious of nearly everyone. Wherever your sympathies lie, the migrants who attempt illegal entry are breaking U.S. laws. The penalties for being a pollero – a human smuggler – are even higher than those for merely crossing. But the crossing through the desert is extremely treacherous and there is much money to be made in smuggling. There is a sense of desperation surrounding the migrants in Altar. If you are willing to leave your home, your family, your traditions and head north to live in secret scraping together a new life in a foreign country that at least officially doesn’t want you to come, I’d imagine that the reasons have to be pretty compelling. Then you add to that a journey across some of the harshest, hottest and driest deserts – nobody is coming to Altar for a vacation. Surprisingly many were willing to openly share their stories with us anyway. We talked to, mostly, men who shared their hopes and plans. They told us they were caring for sick parents, hoping to their children school money, or looking for just a chance to earn an honest wage. Some of them seemed confused and slightly ashamed that their circumstances had driven them to seek a criminal solution. I got the sense that if there could have found a legal option, they would gladly have taken that option. All of them wanted to tell us that they were not coming to the U.S. to break laws or to hurt anyone, nor were they looking for a hand-out or to take advantage of the U.S. social services. While they are likely other people in town with less wholesome reasons for wanting to cross, every person we met told us that they only wanted work.

Korin Anderson

Associate Producer, NGT

For the past week we have been filming with the US Border Patrol in Tucson, Arizona trying to learn about their assignment to secure the southern border. It has been exhausting and enlightening. We have been working long hours, but the Border Patrol works even longer hours. The heat has been hovering in the 90s with blazing sun – and it is ONLY SEPTEMBER. I am so glad we didn’t decide to visit in August. And we aren’t the only ones who suffer in the heat. Everyone who ventures outside is vulnerable. It isn’t the kind of place you want to visit without expert guides and , plenty of water – and in our case, I was very glad to have an air conditioned truck to escape the heat. But the people who work there, and the people who try to cross the Sonoran desert illegally don’t have that luxury All of the Border Patrol agents have been welcoming and eager to share the day to day details of their job. And every single day I am more impressed by their tenacity and professionalism. They also have a really great stash of tools to help them. We jumped into one of their fleet of green striped jeeps and headed out with our guide for the next few days: Agent Danny McClafferty. An agent who has an especially unique assignment, McClafferty is a member of BORSTAR – Border Patrol Search Trauma And Rescue. BORSTAR agents are responsible for patrolling the border as all agents are, but they are also specially trained in desert rescue. Most of them are licensed paramedics ready to treat and rescue anyone in danger in the desert. Soft-spoken Danny unlike my idea of the typical Border Agent as you could imagine. He is awesome and his compassion and commitment to his work are tangible. Danny’s family has been working for the Border Patrol for years and he learned tracking from his dad.

"The distances in the desert are unthinkable to anybody who lives within walking distance of at least 12 Starbucks." - Korin Anderson

After driving for about 50 miles – the distances in the desert are unthinkable to anybody who lives within walking distance of at least 12 Starbucks - we finally reached our destination. We headed off-road – okay, it was probably officially a road, but it didn’t qualify as “road” in my experience—“dirt path” would be a generous overstatement. As we drove along, Danny leaned out the window and watched the dust at the side of the road. He encouraged us to watch along with him and explained that we were looking for either footprints – or perhaps the signs that footprints had been disguised. He explained that the crossers know exactly how the Border Patrol tracks – by driving east and west and hoping to cross their paths northward. The easiest place to see footprints is wherever a group must cross a road. But avoiding detection at these spots appears to be a minor challenge for border crossers. They use a variety of techniques to confuse the agents tracking them. Sometimes they just walk backwards so they would appear to be walking south instead of north – but this doesn’t fool Danny. When you walk backwards your heel makes a deeper impression than when you walk forward. Other groups carry brooms, or twigs to sweep out their tracks. Once they caught a group with a battery powered leaf blower to BLOW out their tracks. These people seem determined to cross at all costs.

Lisa Ling I have traveled to many places on many continents, but I never felt my personal freedom limited as much as it was during our time in North Korea. North Korea is usually off-limits to foreigners—especially to Americans. In order to film the work of Dr. Ruit, a Nepalese eye surgeon, the only way that I could enter the secretive state was to go undercover posing as part of his medical team. Ruit’s goal is to heal patients in poor countries who have gone blind from cataracts. My cameraman and I hoped that we would also get glimpses of real life in North Korea. It turned out to be one of the hardest assignments I had. The government sent us six (!) minders who accompanied us all the way from Katmandu, Nepal to North Korea and back. In Pyongyang they took away our passports and cell phones. There wasn’t a moment when we could wander off and walk around unobserved. I had to stay within eyesight of the hotel, so I jogged in circles around the compound. This is what prison must feel like. The only North Korean citizens we were officially allowed to film were Dr. Ruit’s patients. The number of people who came to see him was overwhelming. In the developed world cataracts hardly ever cause blindness, and mostly elderly people are affected. Here, children and old people alike had lived in the dark for years. All were hoping for a miracle. We witnessed Dr. Ruit and his team operate on more than one thousand people in only six days. It was an act of unbelievable stamina, and proved Dr. Ruit’s deep-rooted humanity. Then the crucial day arrived. A thousand fearful and expectant patients with their eyes bandaged were gathered in one room. What would happen when the bandages come off? Nobody knew and everybody, including us, held their breaths. Dr. Ruit went up to every single person, talked to each one soothingly – and slowly took off the bandage. One by one, we witnessed the miracle happening. Old women saw their grandchildren and children their parents for the first time after years in the dark. But what was so remarkable was that immediately after regaining their sight, rather than thanking the doctor, people started crying and bowing and giving thanks in front of pictures of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung as hundreds clapped and cheered in unison. I never saw such an extreme personality cult before.

Gareth Harvey Battle for the Title… In the brief but brilliant “Age of the Helicopter,” there have been many contenders for the title of “Super Copter.” The CH-47 Chinook, the UH-1 “Huey,” which transformed the very nature of warfare in Vietnam, and Eurocopter’s Ecureuil AS350, which has carried out some of the highest altitude rescues in history. But one of the newest copters that brings it all home is the EH101. Recently chosen to be the next “Marine One”—the Presidential Helicopter, the EH101, will be specially outfitted as the new Oval Office in the sky. It was a tight race with Sikorsky’s S-92, and the competition between the two copters isn’t over yet. Though the EH101 is the president’s vehicle of choice, both of these state-of-the-art flying machines are now vying for a multi-billion dollar contract to supply the U.S. Air Force with their new generation of search and rescue helicopters. Seeing From New Heights Helicopters are a monumental human achievement, a technological feat that’s become so common place we don’t blink an eye at them anymore. But National Geographic’s Explorer takes you for a ride on the EH101 to see why you might want to take a second look. In reality helicopters are among the most complex flying machines ever created. And for three weeks this past summer, we rode with the AgustaWestland EH101, and captured the most spectacular footage I’ve ever seen of helicopters in flight. On location with the British Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and the Italian Navy, we quickly discovered that the EH101 – and other cutting-edge helicopters like the Sikorsky S-92 and NH Industries’ NH90 – have taken the science of rotary flight to a whole new level. What Makes Them Fly? What’s keeping them in the air? Their main rotors, for one thing. The EH101, for example, is a fusion of high-tech composite materials – including carbon fibre – built around a core of honeycomb paper and foam. But it’s more durable and more battle-worthy than an all-metal blade – like those used on the famous Hueys in the Vietnam War. Put a bullet through a composite blade and the fibres around the bullet hole remain undamaged – whereas a metal blade fractures around the impact site. Rotors are essentially ‘spinning wings’ that provide a helicopter with lift – but they also have to propel the aircraft through the air. Main rotor blades twist, flap, and move independently of each other to achieve both lift and thrust simultaneously! By using composite materials, designers of the new-generation Super Copters have far more flexibility in the shaping of rotor blades, and thus far more ‘control’ over the air they move through. The EH101 has a special ‘winged tip’ on its main rotor, which according to its pilots gives it the airborne capability of a much smaller aircraft. Life-Saving Features: No More Brown-Outs And the Royal Air Force pilots operating the EH101 in Iraq discovered a life-saving feature of its main rotor blade which even its developers hadn’t counted on. They found a solution to a pilot’s worst nightmare when flying in the desert—“brown out”—which is a dense cloud of swirling sand and dust, virtually blinding pilots as they’re trying to land. To counteract this, the EH101’s ‘winged-tip’ rotor blades create what its pilots call the “donut effect” – a circular window of clear air inside the dust storm that allows them to see the ground as they come in to land. Engines with Ten Times the Power But perhaps the most remarkable component of the new Super Copter is its state-of-the-art engine. You’d think that ‘jet powered’ helicopters achieved their forward thrust through their jet-engines – but in reality all the power generated by the jets (they’re really ‘gas-turbine engines’) goes into driving the main and tail rotors though an incredibly complex gear-assembly. The latest breed of helicopter engine, while about the same size as the internal-combustion engine of the average family car, develops about ten times the power. The secret is a metal-alloy turbine whose blades exceed their melting point as they spin – forcing air through the chambers of the engine. Each blade is a single crystal of metal, drilled by laser beams, which allows them to be encased in a sheath of air as they whirl around – preventing them from melting. The power generated by this turbine (and transferred through the engine to the rotor blades) is an incredible two thousand horsepower. It’s the sort of power that allows today’s Super Copters to hover rock-steady in high winds – a critical advantage in search and rescue operations. It’s all a long way from the Chinese-rotored flying toys – or from Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘aerial screw’, which many credit as Man’s first inspiration for what would become the ‘helicopter.’ Inventing New Rotors As with fixed-wing flight, the development of helicopters went hand-in-hand with the invention of the internal-combustion engine – light enough and yet powerful enough to lift a heavier-than-air craft off the ground. But the complexities involved in successfully creating a rotary aircraft, as opposed to one with fixed wings, were immense. The primary problem that early helicopter designers – like Igor Sikorsky, the ‘father of the helicopter’ – had to solve was how to stop the airframe from spinning around the main rotor. One solution was the use of twin rotor blades – each spinning the opposite direction. The most famous twin-rotored helicopter is probably Boeing’s CH-47 Chinook – the massive aerial workhorse of armies and air forces around the world. The invention of the tail rotor not only solved the inherent problem of rotary-winged flight, but gave the helicopter its unique manoeuvrability in the air. What became the accepted model for all modern helicopters also quickly became an indispensable tool of war, rescue, and emergency services. Today’s breed of Super Copters are on their way to marking new benchmarks in the helicopter age. Already their superior engines and rotor systems are setting new records in range and reliability – leading to some remarkable rescues and mind-boggling military strategies. Witnessing the capabilities of this new generation of helicopters, and meeting the pilots and the engineers who are making it all possible, it was like flying higher (and steadier) than Cloud Nine. It was truly the ride of our lives!