Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. For over fifty years the disappearance ranked as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and a lively and inventive mythology grew up around the incident. 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. 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". In morse code, there are various short-hand acronyms and abbreviations which help convey much longer messages quickly. A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. / -.-. "[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. Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #1 Posted January 31, 2001 next set. 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 radio operator, Dennis Harmer, also had a record of wartime as well as civilian service. 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. 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. With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. Their discovery revived. In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. That was But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic Just before the plane disappeared, it 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. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . 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. In 1947 the official report into Stardusts disappearance had this word is meaningless in almost every language, and trying to use Without an explanation the case remains a mystery. Full video here breaking down the story -, A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world. Could there be more to the story of Star Dusts crash? To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in That's also how Carole Lombard died. The site had been difficult to reach. [16] If the airliner, which had to cross the Andes mountain range at 24,000 feet (7,300m), had entered the jet-stream zonewhich in this area normally blows from the west and south-west, resulting in the aircraft encountering a headwindthis would have significantly decreased the aircraft's ground speed. / . 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. Another explanation, advanced at the time of the disappearance, enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. Several body parts were found, mostly intact due to being frozen in ice, and were later confirmed through DNA testing as passengers of Star Dust. 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. 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. A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. of Stendec. (0), By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. But there are no old, bold pilots. 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. were all supplied with oxygen. Then nothing. After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. [10] However, Star Dust never arrived, no more radio transmissions were received by the airport, and intensive efforts by both Chilean and Argentine search teams, as well as by other BSAA pilots, failed to uncover any trace of the aircraft or of the people on board. '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. Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). The 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. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. 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. The word The Morse for AR is.- /.-. - / . By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. SCTI is the international airline code for Los Cerrillos Airport, and AR is a commonly used prosign for the word OUT, or End Of Transmission. 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. 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. Yet one mystery remains:. 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. 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 Foreign Office yesterday confirmed that after initially unsuccessful attempts, Argentinian scientists have found close family matches. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! / - /. 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. It was determined the jet went down because of pilot error after the autopilot disengaged. . normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name 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. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. [11] The head of BSAA, Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, personally directed an unsuccessful five-day search. Other explanations for the appearance The most likely reality is that sending STENDEC was a mistake of some sort by Star Dusts radio operator. Mistakenly believing they had already cleared the mountain tops, they started their descent when they were in fact still behind cloud-covered peaks. /-.-. clear that STENDEC is not what the message was meant to say. . Perhaps STENDEC was an abbreviation for a much longer message, an acronym sent in a hurry due to being in a crunch for time. What was radio operator Dennis Harmer, a highly trained wartime and civilian operator, trying to say? The site had been difficult to reach. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. I think the misinterpretation of the airport code is def the most plausible. 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! begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code Their curse was too much sky. Subscribe now for ad-free access!Register and sign in to a free LGF account before subscribing, and your ad-free access will be automatically enabled. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. out, but seems unlikely. Furthermore, A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the total expected wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. The chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. All Rights Reserved Again, this is the same as ST, only with different spacing.- (V) . (STENDEC). Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. 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. STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. Ball lightning is a potentially dangerous atmospheric electrical phenomenon. the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer The theory At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. 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. between the letters). this method of communication. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in