Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). On BSAA's Transatlantic services, moreover, it was operating at the ragged edge of its range when flying westbound. The Lancastrian aircraft, with eleven people on board, never did arrive at Santiago Airport and its location remained unsolved for over fifty years. [9] This leg of the flight was apparently uneventful until the radio operator (Harmer) sent a routine message in Morse code to the airport in Santiago at 5:41 pm, announcing an expected arrival of 5:45 pm. 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! A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The accident aircraft, an Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, was built as constructor's number 1280 for the Argentine Ministry of Supply to carry thirteen passengers, and first flew on 27 November 1945. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. STENDEC - Solved?! [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. With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. Similarly, another Morse expert has pointed out that to attract Voice If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. While the fate of Star Dust had finally been solved, remaining in its wake was still the mystery of the crews final messageSTENDEC. What did the crew of BSAA Flight CS-59 mean when they sent and repeated the cryptic message STENDEC via Morse code seconds before crashing? STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. The fate of the British South American Airways flight, which disappeared in a snowstorm on August 2 1947 en route from Buenos Aires to Chile, was for decades surrounded by rumours of escaping Nazi spies and stolen gold. Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. The Message That Said STENDEC "ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs. out, but seems unlikely. As mentioned in a previous theory, morse code can be easily misinterpreted if incorrectly spaced or misheard by the receiver. Plane and Pilot builds on more than 50 years of serving pilots and owners of aircraft with the goal of empowering our readers to improve their knowledge and enthusiasm for aviation. The problem? hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and In January 2000, a 100-man search party from the Argentine Army clambered 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) up Tupungato Mountain, a 6,552-meter (21,490-foot) volcano, where it located parts of the plane, as well as human bones, at the base of a glacier. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. flew at this time reports that it was common to inform the airport [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. 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. You're right! Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code Spektator 13K subscribers Subscribe 20K views 1 year ago #Documentary #Mystery When a plane goes missing over the Andes Mountains in 1947, its. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. When Harmer and his crew sent their final message to Los Cerrillos, they had no idea that they were seconds away from a fatal impact. Other explanations for the appearance makes clear, modern science has answered most of the questions surrounding the 1947 crash of the civilian aircraft Stardust in the Andes east of Santiago, Chile. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name "[12], A set of events similar to those that doomed Star Dust also caused the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972 (depicted in the film Alive), although there were survivors from that crash because it involved a glancing blow to a mountainside rather than a head-on collision. radio operator getting his planes name wrong on 3 occasions. The word See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. A popular one is that STENDEC is an anagram of DESCENT and the letters were re-arranged due to Harmer suffering from the effects of hypoxia. It is thought that the plane may have caused an avalanche upon impact, resulting in the snowy burial of the aircraft, concealing it from searchers whilst at the same time preserving it for its eventual discovery years later. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. The Mystery of STENDEC - YouTube Avro Lancastrian (Public domain image)It was a story borne out all too often in the annals of aviation disasters. In Morse code, determining accurate spacing between characters is vital to properly interpret the message; "STENDEC" uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as "SCTI AR" (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos Airport in Santiago, "over"). STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. In 1998, over 50 years after the disappearance of Stardust, a group of Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato, one of the highest mountains in the Andes and roughly 50 miles east of Santiago, stumbled upon the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of the Lancastrian. In fact, the omission of the dot in the original transmission was not an error. - - . The disappearance of Terrance Williams and Felipe Santos Two men (unrelated, who didn't know each other) disappeared from Naples, Florida three months apart under the exact same circumstances. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). UFO magazine. 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. otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa_EU5_gWrA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Star_Dust_accident#cite_note-SAR_Technology_-_Aviation_Cold_Case_Response-22, https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/a-pilots-last-words-stendec/, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vanished/stendec.html, https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/vanished.shtml, https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/05/stendec-mystery/, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/06/owenbowcott1v, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jul/08/2, http://www.sartechnology.ca/sartechnology/ST_STENDEC_ColdCase.htm, http://www.ntskeptics.org/2010/2010december/december2010.pdf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosigns_for_Morse_code, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/06/owenbowcott1. USGS. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go. to say on the subject:The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before (STENDEC). Plane and Pilot expands upon the vast base of knowledge and experience from aviations most reputable influencers to inspire, educate, entertain and inform. - . communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information . 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. 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. / -. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. The most likely reality is that sending STENDEC was a mistake of some sort by Star Dusts radio operator. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". destroyer escort during the 70's.We were morse code trained. With the word not existing in international morse code, or any spoken language at the time, interpreting STENDEC has led to many varying theories. 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. _.. . (STENDEC) 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. to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is 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. / / . Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. / . Something like "We're completely screwed.". British . Whilst it's certainly a bizarre coincidence, especially given the circumstances, the theory goes that Harmer was trying to inform the control tower that the plane was going down. transmitted by the plane, reporting their position and intended An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. Ice crystals accumulated on a probe, causing it to give incorrect speed readings and the autopilot system to disengage. Grand Duchess Anastasia (with her arm around her brother) is shown with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1913. some similarities both in Morse code and English /- /.-/ .-./ -../ ..-/ / - (Stardust) Dear NOVA, I am a radio amateur who actively uses the Morse Code. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. [citation needed], Mistakenly assuming their ground speed to be faster than it really was, the crew might have deduced that they had already safely crossed the Andes, and so commenced their descent to Santiago, whereas in fact they were still a considerable distance to the east-north-east and were approaching the cloud-enshrouded Tupungato Glacier at high speed. Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. CONCLUSION . Read on these 10 strange mysteries that were solved later. It has to be this one in my opinion. With that in mind, and the fact that the operator himself mentioned that Harmer sent the message extremely quickly, its likely that this was the message after all. The misunderstanding of their actual location reminds me of Uruguayan Flight 571, the subject of the book and movie Alive! 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. All further calls were the disappearance of the plane - coupled with its final strange 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. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. Seems very unlikely. . (These individuals ignore the fact that almost any other triangle of a similar size, drawn anywhere else in the North Atlantic, would yield a similar if not greater number of disappearances.). Their curse was too much sky. very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who They were finally grounded in 1959, unsurprisingly after yet another ex-BSAA Tudor flew into a Turkish mountain, for reasons that remain unclear, killing all on board. [8], Star Dust left Buenos Aires at 1:46 pm on 2 August. 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. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . Already a member? It's reported as looking luminous and spherical, and can vary in diameter - from pea-sized to several metres long. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space After the third time, communications ceased, and the aircraft disappeared, never reaching its final destination. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. /-.-. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. Checklin never married and his immediate family is now dead, so she and her brothers must decide whether to bring the body back to Britain. 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. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. Discussion Several people have pointed out that Ok, so that covers the theory of the mysterious phrase, but it doesnt answer the mystery of what happened to the plane. (ETA LATE) 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. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. For one, call signs for all BSAA flights in the 1940s began with star. Its unlikely that this would have been a point of confusion for Harmer, especially given that STENDEC wasnt a word. know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. The radio operator meant to say Stardust. Five of the eight British victims have been identified. 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. . 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. ETA LATE sounds like a reasonable message a plane would communicate to a control tower, although in the context of the whole sentence, it contradicts the first part completely, as they were only four minutes away from their destination. word is meaningless in almost every language, and trying to use Weird December 2010 Views: 31,751. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. a new clue the truth is we will never know for sure what that final It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. radio operator in Santiago, where the plane was due to land. "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. If they wanted to convey distress, they would have sent an SOS., Misinterpretation Theory For many years, people wondered if she'd survived the massacre that killed the rest of her family. It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". Was there a connection? Its not even common practice for a plane to transmit its name at the end of a routine message, so this theory also unfortunately falls flat. - / . Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the The International Civil Aviation Organisation had only recently implemented the airline code for Los Cerrillos just four months prior to the event in April 1947, so its more than possible that the airports radio operator was not yet familiar with the term and failed to recognise it. STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. losing the first two dots) yields ETA LATE - apparently a common So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. Whilst a reasonable theory on the surface, its unfortunately also quite reasonable to discredit. STENDEC/STAR DUST Theory Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. There are theories that STENDEC was an abbreviation or acronym of a much larger phrase, and when you break it down you can imagine a whole host of sentences could be constructed using these letters. State Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-OK) has penned several bills loosening gun restrictions, including the nation's first anti-red flag MUNICH (AP) The United States has determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday, insisting that justice must be served to the perpetrators. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. All Rights Reserved 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. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. / . Is that the one where they all started eating each other? sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. How police solved the mystery of a VHS tape depicting sexual assault. They had been . Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. / -.-. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name On 2 August 1947, Star Dust, a British South American Airways (BSAA) Avro Lancastrian airliner on a flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile, crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes. STENDEC and Stardust have Possibly because he was finishing See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. up sign. The weather on the day consisted of snowstorms in the Andes Mountains with moderate to intense turbulence, whilst visual contact with the ground would have been extremely low and unfit for flying. More debris is expected to emerge in future, not only as a result of normal glacial motion, but also as the glacier melts. This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? When flying at high altitudes, oxygen molecules are harder to inhale, and if a plane is not pressurized, it can lead to hypoxia, a condition which can impair or even completely destroy your ability to function. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. Before this message a series of entirely routine messages had been 2023 Little Green Footballs Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. attention, and another signing off. A common example of this would be SOS, which is the internationally recognised distress signal in morse code to call for help. 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. The word STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became. 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. Theories include everything from sabotage to aliens. Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #1 Posted January 31, 2001 next set. But my maternal great . The flight itself was the last leg of a journey which originated from London, with the trip across the Atlantic taking place in a York aircraft, transferring to the Stardust for the crossing of the Andes Mountains. There's still no explanation for the loss of Star Ariel, but so many things went wrong with Tudors on such a regular basis that its disappearance is hardly to be wondered at. Bennett, commander of the Royal Air Force's [Pathfinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_(RAF) during the Second World War -- it developed an unenviable record for unexplained disappearances of its airliners in flight. A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence As only one young woman was on board, it was assumed to have been that of Iris Moreen Evans, a 26-year-old from the Rhondda valley. enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images. / -. Miracle in the Andes is an excellent book by the way. on initials. (STENDEC) 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. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly / -. It would be like ending a story with once upon a time., Conclusion Mysteries Of Flight: The Curious Case Of Pan Am Flight 914, Fond Farewell to a Titan: The Antonov An-225, Plane & Pilot Survey: Pilots and Politics, Accident Brief: Piper PA28R Crash In Georgia. They were flying across the Andes from east to west the pilots thought they were much further west than they were and turned north straight into the mountains and collided with a peak. of mystery, confusion and intrigue ever since. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. [10] It has also been suggested that World War II pilots used this seemingly obscure abbreviation when an aircraft was in hazardous weather and was likely to crash, meaning "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing". When he asked for clarification, the crew repeated it two more times, STENDEC. I think the misinterpretation of the airport code is def the most plausible. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. This one individual in particular mentioned that he asked his 80 year old father, who remembers hearing the phrase being used often by the radio operator on his ship when he served in the Merchant Marine during WWII. This is a personal family mystery that got solved a few years ago, so nothing exciting that would have gotten media attention, haha. The of Stendec. The actual On August 2, 1947, the crew of a British South American Airways (BSAA) Lancastrian, an airliner version of the Avro Lancaster WWII bomber, sent a cryptic message. On Saturday 2nd August 1947, at around 1:45pm, an Avro Lancastrian Mk.III passenger plane known as Stardust departed from Buenos Aires, Argentina to make a roughly 3 hour 45 minute trip to Santiago, Chile. the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling STENDEC - Solved?! 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. / -.. / . There are old pilots and there are bold pilots. The Lancastrian was an unpressurized aircraft, meaning that the crew and passengers could have been subject to hypoxia had their oxygen system failed, and so some suggest that this may have led to Harmer sending parts of his final message in a confused state. Presumed to have crash landed somewhere along the route, a five day effort began by both Chilean and Argentine search teams, including fellow BSAA pilots, yet no trace of the aircraft or its passengers were found. All rights reserved. Then nothing. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet.