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STENDEC
Author: TriSec    Date: 03/22/2014 12:20:08

Good Morning.

Well, spring has sprung (allegedly) and Waltham Youth Soccer wants to try our mettle today. Pretty soon we'll be bundled up for winter camp and huddling together in small clumps of humanity while our child runs around the frozen tundra that will pass for a soccer pitch and his first practice of the season this morning, but I digress.

We're going to talk about missing planes today, but we'll start on the opposite of the world from where you might think.


On August 2, 1947, a converted WWII Lancaster bomber with a handful of passengers was enroute from Buenos Aires to Santiago (Chile). It's a relatively easy flight of just 709 air miles - well within the capabilities of said converted warplane.

But there is a twist. In between these cities lies the Andes mountains, with a maximum height of almost 23,000 feet. Our intrepid Lancastrian had to cross these mountains to reach it's destination safely.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/Stgo_Abril.jpg/220px-Stgo_Abril.jpg

(the Andes looming behind Santiago)


Well....they never made it. About five minutes before their scheduled arrival, the radio operator sent a routine message, and then the aircraft simply disappeared. Extensive searches of the area were conducted, and the air was rife with rumours and speculation, including things like UFO abduction. Eventually....the searches stopped, people moved on, and the story fell out of the news and today the story would be little-known except for one thing.

In 1998, some mountaineers found a wrecked Merlin engine emerging from the leading edge of a retreating glacier. Over the next few months, enough pieces of aircraft emerged for the wreckage to be identified as the long-lost "Star Dust" aircraft. Fifty years entombed in ice would have erased any hope of recovering flight data, but this plane was from an era before flight recorders anyway. It was eventually decided that the plane got crossed up in the jet stream, and the pilot began his descent before he actually cleared the mountains and wound up flying head-on into a glacier at cruising speed.

There is a more famous accident that happened in the same general area, and if Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa hadn't hiked out, the likelihood is that we'd still be wondering what happened to Flight 571.

http://photos.wikimapia.org/p/00/00/65/45/52_big.jpg

(The crash site today)


But this is just one corner of the world. There's at least two more aircraft that simply disappeared that you might have heard about. I will be brief.

In May of 2003, a completely airworthy Boeing 727 once owned by American Airlines, taxied out of maintenence and made an unauthorized takeoff from Luanda, Angola. There was no radio communication, and the transponder was off. It simply disappeared, and would have been another aviation footnote except for two things. The alleged hijacking came less than two years after 9-11 when we were still on our witch-hunt, so the CIA was very interested in a jetliner disappearing. And a Mr. Ben Padilla, an American, was supposedly at the controls when the jet took off. It's been ten years, and like Star Dust, this plane is simply gone without a trace.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Boeing_727-223_of_American_Airlines_Chicago_O%27Hare.jpg

(Incident aircraft in better days)



I'll finish up with our tour fairly close by - here in the Bermuda Triangle. I won't trouble you with Flight 19. There is a more interesting disappearance out there. In 1948, another WWII era plane was making the flight from San Juan, PR to Miami. This was the old reliable DC-3 (Many hundreds of which are still in revenue service today). The flight was in clear conditions and was again utterly routine except for a couple of things. In those days there was no "MEL" or minimum equipment list. The pilot made the decision to fly with an unreliable radio and a badly charging battery, conditions which would automatically ground an aircraft today. The flight made it to within 50 miles of Miami before losing contact. Their last radio transmission was not received at MIA, but rather 600 miles away at New Orleans, which led some to speculate that the plane was wildly off course due to other factors. This wreckage has never been found, and it's since become part of the Bermuda Triangle lore.

http://www.bermuda-triangle.org/assets/images/DC-3wreckangle.jpg

(DC-3 in the Bahamas, not the missing plane)


There's plenty more missing aircraft out there, including the most famous of all, the plane of Mrs. Putnam and her navigator Fred Noonan. The world is a very big place, and finding 240 feet of Boeing 777 among thousands of square miles of ocean and jungle is no easy task, as we all well know.
 

2 comments (Latest Comment: 03/23/2014 12:47:52 by velveeta jones)
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