Investigators concluded that the crew, flying in a snowstorm against a powerful jet stream, had become confused about their location and believed they were closer to Santiago than they actually were. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. It's reported as looking luminous and spherical, and can vary in diameter - from pea-sized to several metres long. As it turns out, STENDEC is an anagram of the word descent. One popular theory is that the crew, flying at 24,000 feet in an unpressurized aircraft, suffered from hypoxia. _. Her sisters, boyfriend and sons knew nothing of her illness until suddenly, during a family gathering in October 2018 at a diner in Reading The Online Photographer lead me to this article. Their curse was too much sky. aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. The North Texas Skeptic - /. Whilst this possibility lends true to the first half of the word, the rest does not match up with this theory, and considering it was sent through and received the exact same three times over, its hard to imagine this error occurring on both ends. For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing". The radio operator, Dennis Harmer, also had a record of wartime as well as civilian service. All rights reserved. After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. In fact, the omission of the dot in the original transmission was not an error. As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. 1947 an British South American Airways aircraft named Star Dust disappeared, it's last message was simply "STENDEC". Investigators concluded that the crew, flying in a snowstorm against a powerful jet stream, must have become confused about their location and believed they were closer to their destination then they actually were, with the crash being the result of a controlled descent into terrain. But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. On this ill-fated day, a British South American Airways airliner called Star Dust carrying six passengers and five crew members crashed during its journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago. Furthermore, aircraft were usually referred to by their registration, which in Stardusts case was G-AGWH, rather than the more romantic monikers the airline had given them. on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was All Rights Reserved Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. Thanks SK. [12], A report by an amateur radio operator who claimed to have received a faint SOS signal from Star Dust initially raised hopes that there might have been survivors,[11] but all subsequent attempts over the years to find the vanished aircraft failed. A mix of misinterpretation and a lack of recent knowledge led to the operator instead hearing the term STENDEC, which, combined with the disappearance of the plane, led to one of South Americas greatest aviation mysteries. Miracle in the Andes is an excellent book by the way. / -.. / . [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. Top 10 Intriguing Mysteries Of South America - Listverse . If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. Whilst many accepted that the fate of Stardust and its crew had been settled, the absence of a wreckage, along with the mysterious circumstances surrounding its final message, lead to widespread speculation, with theories spanning from sabotage to extraterrestrial in nature. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! - we are unable to respond to further suggestions about the meaning 10 Unsolved Airplane Mysteries | HowStuffWorks on initials. in other words 'EC' without the space. attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling the ETA. ntskeptics.org The "STENDEC mystery," referring to the cryptic message sent by a Lancastrian airliner before it vanished in the Andes, is a staple of the UFO culture. And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only This gives us the very Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #1 Posted January 31, 2001 next set. Background . The radio operator meant to say Stardust. Technology Inc. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information Relatives of the crew and passengers aboard a British plane which plunged into an Argentinian glacier 55 years ago have been told this week their DNA samples match human remains recovered from a crash site 15,000ft up in the Andes. this method of communication. 2023 Little Green Footballs It has to be this one in my opinion. STENDEC and Stardust have For those who aren't familiar, a flight carrying a Uruguayan rugby team and some of their family members crashed into the Andes in 1972. The actual Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C Things like air turbulance (in my case, rough seas) also affect that rythm. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. of the station they wish to contact. The experienced crew of the "Stardust" apparently realized the plane was off course in a northerly direction (it was found eighty kilometers off its flight path), or they purposely departed from the charted route to avoid bad weather. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. In Mendoza, one startling picture published in the city's newspapers aroused particular curiosity. Morse '._._.' Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. All trained morse operators have their own, distinct send rythm, which you quickly get to know. Each letter in morse code consists of a number of unique dots and dashes, so to scramble a word like descent in such a way is highly unlikely, especially three times in succession. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. It was the manicured hand of a young woman lying among the ice and rocks. BBC - Science & Nature - Horizon - Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] / - / . For other uses, see, Discovery of wreckage and reconstruction of the crash, "Pilot finally cleared over mystery of 1947 mountain plane disaster", "Aircraft operated by British South American Airways", "DNA clues reveal 55-year-old secrets behind crash of the Star Dust", "Vanished: 1947 Official Accident Report", "I Am Alive: The Crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571", Ministry of Civil Aviation official report on the accident, 1948, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Star_Dust_accident&oldid=1142432641, This page was last edited on 2 March 2023, at 10:00. This is fascinating. Even if exchanges between two operators become conversational, the operator writes the reply before sending it.From this, and from standard morse procedure, Harmer's transmission would be to inform Stardust's ETA, destination city, airport code SCTI ( Los Cerillos), and conclude with prosign AR (dit dah, dit dah dit) to end transmission. This is a personal family mystery that got solved a few years ago, so nothing exciting that would have gotten media attention, haha. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. Due to the poor visibility caused by the storm, its possible that the crew were unaware that their plane was on course to collide with the mountainside, and unknowingly plummeted the aircraft into the summit before eventually succumbing to the elements. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites, Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. . begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code STENDEC/STAR DUST Theory - . - / . This would mean the message he was trying to send Los Cerrillos was instead: When you look at the beginning of the words, you can notice some similarities, which shows how easy it can sometimes be to mistranslate morse code. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Harris Joel is a founding member and the resident keyboard wizard for Umphreys McGee AND a long-time Phish fan! SAR Hence we have: simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). It would have been Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie Weird December 2010 Views: 31,837 ntskeptics.org The "STENDEC mystery," referring to the cryptic message sent by a Lancastrian airliner before it vanished in the Andes, is a staple of the UFO culture. They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced Another noticeable similarity is that the word STENDEC has some resemblance to the word STARDUST, and perhaps Harmer misspelled the name of the aircraft in morse code. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. STENDEC - Solved?! / / . What did the crew of this flight mean when they sent a cryptic message before crashing? See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. / -.-. DNA clues reveal 55-year-old secrets behind crash of the Star Dust It was also, as OP says, unpressurized, so that passengers as well as crew had to breathe supplemental oxygen through masks while above 15,000 feet. It seems This would have explained the suddenness of its disappearance, and the fact that large pieces of wreckage had not been spotted during a wide air and land search. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy Not understanding the word "STENDEC" he queried it The problem? /- (ST) / -. It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. In January 2000, they located the site and began recovering debris. INITIALS A WGBH-Boston NOVA: Vanished (2001) program about the crash commented: Some of the six passengers on board seemed to have stepped straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. They included a Palestinian businessman with a sizable diamond sewn into the lining of his jacket; a German migr, Marta Limpert, returning to Chile with the ashes of her dead husband; and a British courier carrying diplomatic correspondence. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. But my maternal great . [10] The Chilean Air Force radio operator at Santiago airport described this transmission as coming in "loud and clear" but very fast; as he did not recognise the last word, he requested clarification and heard "STENDEC" repeated twice in succession before contact with the aircraft was lost. Using the STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. The Army unit also discovered that the wheels on the plane were in an upward position, so the crew had not attempted an emergency landing. On August 2, 1947, the Stardust, a Lancastrian III passenger plane with eleven people on board, was almost four hours into its flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile. Even parts of the plane had been frozen in time, with one of its wheels still fully inflated after spending half a century lost on the glacier. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name NOVA Online | Vanished! | Theories (Jan. 31, 2001) - PBS begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code The captain, Reginald Cook, was an experienced former Royal Air Force pilot with combat experience during the Second World War, as were his first officer, Norman Hilton Cook, and second officer, Donald Checklin. The problem here though is that, even if this was the case, it would be unusual for Harmer to use a phrase which was not internationally recognised, and only specifically known to allied participants of the war. A Spanish magazine about UFOs appropriated STENDEK as its title, and at least one U.S. comic book illustrated the disappearance of the Stardust, pondering the meaning of STENDEC for its fascinated readers. very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who _.. . . The unit had to finish quickly. To put it simply, Cook chose the worst route possible in consideration of the conditions, which more than likely played a key role in the planes disappearance. Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? Despite Stardusts fate now fully resolved, the mystery of STENDEC is still argued to this day, with no definitive conclusion on what Dennis Harmer was intending to communicate that evening. The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible. It was firstly noted that the Trans-Andean journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago can be taken via three routes: The Central (and most direct) via Mendoza, The Southern via Planchon and The Northern via San Juan. Firstly, despite it being easy to rearrange STENDEC quickly in English text, doing the same in morse code is much more complex and highly implausible due to the nature of the language. Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. Believers of this theory claim it stood for something like, Stardust tank empty, no diesel, expected crash, or, Santiago tower, emergency, now descending, entering cloud. Experts on Morse code are quick to call hogwash on this theory, however, saying that the crew would have never cryptically abbreviated an important message. The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. That part of the puzzle wouldnt be solved until half a century later. With the plane supposedly minutes away from the airport, the final word from the Lancastrian became shrouded in mystery when the plane, along with everyone on board, vanished into thin air. [18], Star Dust is likely to have flown into a nearly vertical snowfield near the top of the glacier, causing an avalanche that buried the wreckage within seconds and concealed it from searchers. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. Sign in to continue reading. Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable even has an entry for STENDEC. Dozens of books and articles have examined the evidence, turned it over, twisted it, rearranged the letters, and drawn a blank. which is identical - although with different spacings - to EC. Almost a year after the loss of Star Tiger, her sister aircraft, Star Ariel, also vanished in good weather while on a flight from Bermuda to Jamaica. Blast From the Past: The North Texas Skeptic, May 1999, Republican Senator Claims 'The Left' Will Start a Civil War Unless Federal Highway System Abolished, A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline, Popular Instagram Photographer Revealed as AI Fraud, Cutting IRS Funding Is a Gift to Americas Wealthiest Tax Evaders, Record 6,542 Guns Intercepted at US Airport Security in 22, Interview With Oklahoma State Sen. Nathan Dahm, US: Russia Has Committed Crimes Against Humanity in Ukraine, Joel Cummins Umphreys McGee Keyboard Rig - January 2023 [VIDEO], Oklahoma Judge Transfers Lesbian Moms Parental Rights to Her Sons Sperm Donor. Imagine your last communication with someone being the equivalent of covfefe and it turning into a mystery that people puzzle over for decades, I still have no clue what covfefe means and suspect people will puzzle over it for decades, British South American Airways (BSAA), the operator of the doomed aircraft, was a particularly unfortunate air carrier. The Chilean operator did mention how Harmers messages came through unusually fast, so there is every chance that some letters were incorrectly spaced and caused confusion to the control tower. After this, British civil aviation authorities withdrew the Tudor's certification to carry passengers, and the few remaining examples concluded their operational service as cargo and tanker aircraft. The searchers discovered one propeller, its tips scarred and bent backward, indicating that the prop had been revolving when the Lancastrian plowed into the Tupungato glacier. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI).



Florida Man September 25, 2003, Who Is Karen Wheaton Husband, Steve Edelson Los Angeles, Mr Jacks Tawas, Mi Menu, Metro Nashville Employee Self Service, Articles S