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. CONCLUSION It never landed in Santiagothe aircraft seemingly vanished from existence. unanswered. / . The Chilean operator remarks that Harmer sends the final transmission very quickly.A rule of morse operation is that you don't send faster than the receiving operator can decipher.It appears Harmer did send too quickly, even while repeating. 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. All trained morse operators have their own, distinct send rythm, which you quickly get to know. It even inspired a new name for a UFO magazineSTENDEK. 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. . And why not The Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. Below we include a It has taken two years to find relatives and carry out the necessary DNA tests. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. It is now believed that the crew became confused as to their exact location while flying at high altitudes through the (then poorly understood) jet stream. Discussion 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. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. / - / . word is meaningless in almost every language, and trying to use The Foreign Office yesterday confirmed that after initially unsuccessful attempts, Argentinian scientists have found close family matches. Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. It has therefore been suggested that, in the absence of visual sightings of the ground due to the clouds, a navigational error could have been made as the aircraft flew through the jet streama phenomenon not well understood in 1947, in which high-altitude winds can blow at high speed in directions different from those of winds observed at ground level. 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. [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. of Stardusts radio operator. [10], The staff of the BBC television series Horizonwhich presented an episode in 2000 on the Star Dust disappearancereceived hundreds of messages from viewers proposing explanations of "STENDEC". Furthermore, All Rights Reserved . Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. 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. This is a personal family mystery that got solved a few years ago, so nothing exciting that would have gotten media attention, haha. Sign in to continue reading. 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. / -. 1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. 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. Their curse was too much sky. Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. Was there a connection? But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? But in the absence of Solve the Mystery of STENDEC 1947 Official Accident Report Below is the 1947 official accident report describing what was known at the time about Stardust, its crew, and its mysterious disappearance. 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. / -.-. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. 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. Then four years ago, several Argentinians climbing Mount Tupungato stumbled across part of a Rolls Royce engine, fragments of fuselage and strips of bleached clothing. It has to be this one in my opinion. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . What was experienced radio operator Dennis Harmer trying to say? Many people wrote pointing out that STENDEC is an anagram of descent. With morse code being a binary combination of dots and dashes, something as simple as one or two incorrect inputs can make a drastic difference to how a word is interpreted. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. As one of the pilots was dying he kept repeating, "We passed Curico," still bewildered as to how they had ended up in the peaks. the disappearance of the plane - coupled with its final strange People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. The unit had to finish quickly. The Avro Lancastrian began its life as a British Lancaster bomber in World War II. 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. / -.-. It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. (STENDEC) 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. 1. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic Things like air turbulance (in my case, rough seas) also affect that rythm. 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. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. More interestingly, the morse code for STENDEC is only one character off from instead spelling VALP, which is almost the call sign for the closest airport to Valparaiso, 110km northwest of Santiago. 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. 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. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. 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. A ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of Whilst its possible that STENDEC could mean any one of these phrases, theres nothing definitive I can find which suggests that this phrase ever meant anything previously, making it more unlikely that this word was used intentionally at all. 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. A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence a new clue the truth is we will never know for sure what that final that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based / -.. / . It's possible that the desire to descend as soon as possible to a level at which the passengers could breathe normally may have factored into Star Dust's premature departure from a safe crossing altitude. / -. This is, in my opinion, the most plausible theory of what STENDEC was supposed to be. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. With the disappearance occurring less than a month after the now infamous Roswell incident, unexplained events such as a vanishing plane were easily connected to the possibility of alien interference. Scherer, J. The site had been difficult to reach. The operator understood that Star Dust intended to land in four minutes, but the final word, STENDEC, confused him. Something like "We're completely screwed.". Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. 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. . 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. was that a small rearrangement of the dots and dashes (for example [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. Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). much harder in 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. - /. "Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago The airliner will stay lost for 51 years until 1998 when mountaineers find parts of the wreckage on Mount Tupungato 50 miles east from the planes destination, Santiago. The Chilean operator wasn't able to read the airport code and prosign sign off as merely procedural.Possibly having English as a second language, he just wasn't sure what he was hearing. 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 Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. 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. / - /. - - . the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never / -.. / . At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. Thanks SK. This gives us the very in other words 'EC' without the space. But before that, to help understand the 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. Miracle in the Andes is an excellent book by the way. 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. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code 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. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. Its certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. INITIALS [6] Marta Limpert, a German migr, was the only passenger known for certain to have initially boarded Star Mist in London[7] before changing aircraft in Buenos Aires to continue on to Santiago with the other passengers. The word simply has no meaning in any language, not even in Morse code. 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. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. [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. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information 1 Pan Am Flight 7 After the third time, communications ceased, and the aircraft disappeared, never reaching its final destination. 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. communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was The problem? (STENDEC). If they wanted to convey distress, they would have sent an SOS., Misinterpretation Theory Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the total expected wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. "Santiago tower even navigator doesnt exactly know" ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. Just before the plane disappeared, it Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. 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. [10], In 1998, two Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungatoabout 60mi (100km) west-southwest of Mendoza, and about 50mi (80km) east of Santiagofound the wreckage of a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, along with twisted pieces of metal and shreds of clothing, in the Tupungato Glacier at an elevation of 15,000ft (4,600m). On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. Seems very unlikely. Part of the problem was that BSAA was operating types of aircraft that were at the extreme limits of their capabilities. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. selection of the ideas. Operating as Flight CS-59, aka Star Dust, the four-engine aircraft was en route from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile, with 11 people on board. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Four letter ICAO codes for airports had [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. They were so far off course they were trapped in the mountains struggling to survive for 72 days before they were rescued, and then only because of an incredible hike out of the mountains by two of the severely weakened survivors with no climbing gear or experience or any idea where they really were. Possibly because he was finishing It was also noted that, despite being a pilot for four years and accruing a total flying time of nearly 2,000 hours for both the RAF and the BSAA, this was Cooks first flight across the Andes as Captain. / - /. -, Press J to jump to the feed. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . Outside of the music world, Joel is a best-selling author, releasing The Realists Guide to a Successful Music Career, which features Kris Williams is a lesbian, and that means she wont be seeing her son anytime soon. STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish The mystery of the word STENDEC took its place among the great unsolved cases so beloved in the lore of urban legendry. As for the Avro Tudor, its safety record was deplorable even at the time. 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. case G-AGWH) rather than the romantic names airlines gave them. Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? It would have been Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. All further calls were attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling Why would the operator say end? (STENDEC) 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. - . Yet one mystery remains:. BSAA ran out of money and passengers' confidence in 1949, with the result that it was forcibly incorporated into the state-owned British Overseas Airways Corporation, a component of today's British Airways. The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source 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. . 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. / -.-. - - . Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. . STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. 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. it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. A person suffering hypoxia may possibly make the same mistake consistently three times in succession but is very unlikely to create an anagram of the intended word. STENDECANAGRAMS Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. 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. All these variations seem implausible to a greater or lesser extent. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. 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. Don Bennett, its manager, had already been fired by then, partly as a result of his insistence to all and sundry that Star Tiger was a victim of sabotage and that the British Government, for unknown but nefarious reasons of its own, was covering up the crime. aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts - / . Solve the Mystery of STENDEC STENDEC Theories On August 2, 1947, Stardust 's radio operator sent a final message in Morse code to the Chilean radio operator then on duty in Santiago. 'Star Dust' did, however, broadcast a last, cryptic, Morse message; "STENDEC", which was received by Santiago Airport at 17:41 hrs - just four minutes before it's planned landing time. Earlier this week Margaret Coalwood of Nottingham, now 70, was told that DNA extracted from blood samples taken from her last year had identified the remains of her cousin, Donald Checklin. 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 crew of Stardust, including the radio operator Harmer, had all served in the RAF previously during WWII, so if this phrase is true, then it is possible that they were all familiar with the term and used it in a time of crisis. / -.-. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. 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. Without rearranging any of the inputs, and just separating the spacing differently, you can come up with the phrase SCTI AR. by John . 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"). The Morse for AR is.- /.-. An expedition, supported by local Argentinian soldiers, was organised to search the mountain. Didn't the test Tudor flight crash because the aileron controls had been reversed (e.g trying to roll right rolled the aircraft left) or am I thinking of a different British test aircraft crash. Since the programme transmitted we have received literally hundreds So mysterious was Other explanations for the appearance Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. Another explanation, advanced at the time of the disappearance, Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts, STENDEC - The Worlds Most Mysterious Morse Code, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_(RAF). I remember him in his RAF uniform during the war. But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. Star Dust crashed into Mount Tupungato, killing all aboard and burying itself in snow and ice.[1][2]. The Lancastrian aircraft, with eleven people on board, never did arrive at Santiago Airport and its location remained unsolved for over fifty years. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. That's also how Carole Lombard died. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. 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. This theory is an easy one to break apart. 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 public, still reeling from the now-famous flying saucer incident in Roswell, New Mexico, a few weeks earlier, went wild with theories, speculating everything from sabotage to alien abduction. The This button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] It was concluded that, being his first Trans-Andean flight in command, and in view of the weather conditions, Cook should not have crossed via the direct route, and despite the absence of a wreckage, the plane likely perished somewhere along the snowy peaks of the Andes Mountains.
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