MOYOCK, N.C. — Erik Prince gets his guests to the runway seconds before the turboprop's approach. The financiers hop out of his black Chevy Suburban and gawk as the pilots drop a pair of packages that float to within feet of their target — just as they might on a mission for Blackwater Worldwide in the Afghan backcountry.

His audience is captivated by the show, but the Blackwater founder and CEO focuses on a seemingly minor detail: the parachutes.

"They're made out of the same stuff sandbags are made out of," Prince, a former Navy SEAL, tells the group in hurried, staccato sentences. "They are truly disposable. The normal parachutes you put a human out under are much more expensive. With these, you can use them, repack them. It's very cheap."

Then it's back in the Suburban — a "sub" in Blackwater talk — as Prince speeds the investors off to their next stop on the tour of Blackwater's campus in the North Carolina swamplands. This is life at Prince's Blackwater: the glitz of business, the grit of military.

In that mix, critics see Blackwater as a company that recklessly abuses the gears of war to make a buck.

Prince and his devoted team view themselves as a military support staff that helps the government save a buck through an obsessive commitment to identifying and fixing inefficiencies in operations and training.

"You can't paint with one broad brush that absolutely applies across this whole place," Bill Mathews, the company's executive vice president, said during a recent interview with The Associated Press. "This is sort of the quintessential veteran-owned, -operated and -managed company. Almost everybody is a former U.S. serviceman."

Their work is hardly charity. Prince is pushing his company to reach $1 billion in revenues annually by 2010. To get there, he's decided to scale back the work — private security contracting — that at first drove the company's growth but later made Blackwater one of the most caustic brand names in history.

Prince and another former Navy SEAL founded Blackwater a decade ago, sensing an opportunity to provide training for the SEALs based in nearby Virginia Beach, Va., and for law enforcement officers and others in the military.

The company only started booming after the bombing of USS Cole and the Sept. 11 attacks, and president Gary Jackson said the government later approached Blackwater about providing private security.

Prince and his team were able to fill a Rolodex with thousands of contractors who were willing to stand in harm's way to protect diplomats at a time when the military was fighting wars across two countries.

"Typically, there's something that needs to be done that nobody else can really get done at the time — other than the military, and they're too busy. So, they ask us," Mathews said.

At one point, Jackson said, security contracting was 50 percent of Blackwater's business. The company has fans among those they protect, including U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, and guards have never lost anyone under their protection.

But the work has also earned Blackwater a legion of detractors. The company's workers were involved in two of the defining moments of the Iraq war — the grisly slaying of four Blackwater contractors in 2004 in Fallujah, and a September 2007 shooting at a crowded Baghdad intersection that killed 17 Iraqis — triggering congressional hearings and investigations from more than a dozen federal agencies.

One of the four men slain in Fallujah was Big Island resident Wesley Batalona, 48, a former Army Ranger. The families of the four employees have sued Blackwater, claiming the victims were sent out with inadequate equipment and protection.

As the company scales back its security contracting business, executives see the most untapped potential in places that need air support. Blackwater started gobbling up agile EADS CASA C-212 aircraft after noticing the military was struggling to reach remote runways in places such as Afghanistan.

Its fleet is now 58 strong — from helicopters to cargo planes to fighters — with each craft tracked on enormous flat-screen TVs back at headquarters, where executives can watch Prince fly down the East Coast or keep an eye on contractors as they buzz up the Tigris River on a return to Baghdad's Green Zone.