As the compressed snow turned to ice, the wreckage would have been incorporated into the body of the glacier, with fragments emerging many years later and much further down the mountain. 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. 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. But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer Among the grisly remains scattered over a radius of more than a mile on the glacier were three human torsos, a foot in an ankle boot and a hand with fingers outstretched. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) - LGF Pages 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. In Britain, the news led to a hunt for surviving relatives. It also seems clear that the message was not anticipating a crash, The Morse for AR is.- /.-. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. 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. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes It was determined the jet went down because of pilot error after the autopilot disengaged. (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. So mysterious was If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . 'ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs STENDEC' This page has been archived and is no longer updated. The unit had to finish quickly. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. Scherer, J. Its civil certificate of airworthiness (CofA) number 7282 was issued on 1 January 1946. 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. (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.). In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. It has to be this one in my opinion. However, the mystery of the final radio message remains. They had been . While the fate of Star Dust had finally been solved, remaining in its wake was still the mystery of the crews final messageSTENDEC. most of the mysteries surrounding Stardusts disappearance, See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. out very fast. The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. 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. Procedures for sending and receiving messages were and are standardised whether you are services or civilian operators.Regarding the 'mystery' surrounding Harmer's last transmission.Firstly, an operator always has in front of them a written copy of the message being sent. 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. And even less likely that the same morse dyslexia would be repeated transmitted by the plane, reporting their position and intended 2023 Little Green Footballs Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from / -.. / . (ETA LATE) / -.-. Using the "STENDEC Solved." The North Texas Skeptic. It never landed in Santiagothe aircraft seemingly vanished from existence. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. 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 Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. 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. Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. The Foreign Office yesterday confirmed that after initially unsuccessful attempts, Argentinian scientists have found close family matches. Explanations based in Morse code Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. Similarly, another Morse expert has pointed out that to attract Possibly because he was finishing The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. - /. STENDEC" That wasthe last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. Their discovery revived interest in solving the mystery of what had happened to Flight CS59 and its 11 passengers and crew. radio operator getting his planes name wrong on 3 occasions. - /. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. Things like air turbulance (in my case, rough seas) also affect that rythm. 1 Pan Am Flight 7 As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. At 5:41 p.m., a Chilean Morse code radio operator for the Los Cerrillos Airport received a message. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. 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. At around 5:41pm, after transmitting routine communications to the plane as usual, the control tower at Los Cerrillos Airport in Santiago received this morse code message from Stardust: Perplexed by the final word in the telegram, the Chilean operator requested Stardusts radio officer, Dennis Harmer, to relay the message back to him, only to hear the same word, STENDEC, repeated loud and clearly twice in succession. 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. 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. 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. to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is Is that the one where they all started eating each other? this method of communication. The Theory 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. [5] The passengers were one woman and five men of Palestinian, Swiss, German and British nationality. It would have been 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. The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. 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. 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. It makes me want to write out the Morse code and play with the spacing. Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared 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. '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. Ball lightning. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse / . - / . Five months after the episode described by OP, one of BSAA's Avro Tudor IV aircraft, Star Tiger, with 31 persons on board, vanished on a flight from Lisbon to Bermuda with an intermediate fuel stop in the Azores. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. Hence we have: 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. This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. 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. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. But my maternal great . The problem? Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing. Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory "STENDEC" in Morse code is: / - / . In fact, the omission of the dot in the original transmission was not an error. Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. I remember him in his RAF uniform during the war. [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. [4], Star Dust's last flight was the final leg of BSAA Flight CS59, which had started in London on an Avro York named Star Mist on 29 July 1947, landing in Buenos Aires on 1 August. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had 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. Mistakenly believing they had already cleared the mountain tops, they started their descent when they were in fact still behind cloud-covered peaks. 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". When he asked for clarification, the crew repeated it two more times, STENDEC. If spacing between letters is hard to distinguish, its clear to see how some characters can be accidentally mistaken for others, leading to incorrect words or phrases. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely That would leave just "END", sandwiched between a signal attracting 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 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 button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic 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. People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. 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. 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. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . Using the The radio operator meant to say Stardust. . "Santiago tower even navigator doesnt exactly know" [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". By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. The site had been difficult to reach. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . The names of the victims were known. 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. Was there a connection? course. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. This is fascinating. message from Star Dust - "E.T.A. . Mrs Coalwood said: "He was my older cousin, who I idolised hopelessly. Without an explanation the case remains a mystery. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . 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. unanswered. The chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. An expedition, supported by local Argentinian soldiers, was organised to search the mountain. 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. They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced Thanks SK. Could it be that Stardust were informing Los Cerrillos that they were on course for Rodelillo Airfield near Valparaiso instead, diverging from their original route? Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. [11] The head of BSAA, Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, personally directed an unsuccessful five-day search. The flight was conducted in zero-visibility conditions, so its unlikely the crew had any idea their plane was about to impact a mountainside. Americas owner-flown aircraft enthusiasts and active-pilot resource, delivered to your inbox! . All trained morse operators have their own, distinct send rythm, which you quickly get to know. And why not 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. STENDECANAGRAMS / / -.-. STENDEC - Solved?! Weird December 2010 Views: 31,751. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. by John . Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was The Message That Said STENDEC "ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs. Background All Rights Reserved The most widely speculated of these phrases is the following: Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash Landing. 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. Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. Ok, so that covers the theory of the mysterious phrase, but it doesnt answer the mystery of what happened to the plane. All these variations seem implausible to a greater or lesser extent. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! / -.. / . An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. So mysterious was the disappearance of the plane - coupled with it's final strange message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). It was the manicured hand of a young woman lying among the ice and rocks. 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. But before that, to help understand the communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). 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. / -.-. Well that was fascinating and, while kinda sad I'm not going to pretend is not kinda funny hearing you explain all the ways that the Tudor sucked shit. The theory about it meaning emergency crash landing is interesting but given a lack of sources outside of a few people telling anecdotes I don't know how believable it is. [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. The Theory "[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. 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. People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. / . UFO magazine. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. . It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours.

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