STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. End Credits. Their curse was too much sky. 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. USGS. Its civil certificate of airworthiness (CofA) number 7282 was issued on 1 January 1946. In 1997, an ultra-low frequency, weird but loud noise . 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. [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. - / . But there are no old, bold pilots. to say on the subject:The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before . [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. -, Press J to jump to the feed. It would have been losing the first two dots) yields ETA LATE - apparently a common 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. [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. the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer 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. / -.-. Why would Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. Several body parts were also discovered, most of them intact due to being preserved in ice, and were later confirmed through DNA to be the passengers and crew of Stardust. The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source 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. So mysterious was / . Just before the plane disappeared, it 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. 2023 Little Green Footballs Its fate became one of the most puzzling aviation mysteries of its time. Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. Anagram Theory [13] Some BSAA pilots, however, expressed scepticism at this theory; convinced that Cook would not have started his descent without a positive indication that he had crossed the mountains; they have suggested that strong winds may have brought down the craft in some other way. 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. 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. Using the [19][20] This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . 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. 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. Without an explanation the case remains a mystery. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. But my maternal great . STENDEC - Solved?! 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. 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? 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. Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse They had been . 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. Star Dust crashed into Mount Tupungato, killing all aboard and burying itself in snow and ice.[1][2]. Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. 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. The official 1947 report into Stardusts disappearance highlighted a number of possibilities as to what likely happened to the ill-fated flight, with multiple factors potentially playing a role in its demise. Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes . They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. Mysteries / -.-. close to an understanding of the message. Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. message from Star Dust - "E.T.A. Even if an equipment malfunction had occurred, what are the odds that only one word would be jumbled in the message and that it would be done so three times in exactly the same order? Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the total expected wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. / -. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] [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. Using the reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given At 5:41 p.m., a Chilean Morse code radio operator for the Los Cerrillos Airport received a message. These included suggestions that the radio operator, possibly suffering from hypoxia, had scrambled the word "DESCENT" (of which "STENDEC" is an anagram); that "STENDEC" may have been the initials of some obscure phrase or that the airport radio operator had misheard the Morse code transmission despite it reportedly having been repeated multiple times. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. 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. of the station they wish to contact. Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. . the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. Mystery solved. by aliens. The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. The central route via Mendoza was considered to be the quickest of the three, yet potentially the most dangerous depending on weather conditions. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. Sometimes human error leads to some of the most interesting mysteries but generally when you hear hooves you want to think horses before you think zebras. 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. of the above, please follow the link to Martin Colwell's website here - Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. 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. A solution to the word "STENDEC" has not been found. 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. / -.. / . enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. / - (Descent) Several people have pointed out that But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. They hadn't passed Curico. Then nothing. Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? 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. And finally, there seems to be no reason to transmit the planes Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. / -.-. 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 button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. 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. most of the mysteries surrounding Stardusts disappearance, [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. selection of the ideas. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. STENDECANAGRAMS A few years later, more debris was found on the mountain, suggesting that the plane had made a head-on impact with the ground due to the close proximity and condition of the wreckage. One of those two people was Nando Parrado and in his book "Miracle in the Andes" he describes that their flight also left in poor, inadvisable conditions. Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from 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. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. 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. communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? This was the case in 1947 when an airliner crashed in the Andes, killing everyone aboard. But in the absence of [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". 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. 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. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images. "STENDEC" in Morse code is: / - / . Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. . 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. [11], In 2000, an Argentine Army expedition found additional wreckageincluding a propeller and wheels (one of which had an intact and inflated tyre)and noted that the wreckage was well localised, a fact which pointed to a head-on impact with the ground, and which also ruled out a mid-air explosion. The last two possible mistranslations both involve an input mistake of some sort, but there is another phrase which uses the exact same morse code sequence as STENDEC but with different spacing. . 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. / . this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). Thanks SK. By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. Morse transmissions prior to picking up voice communication. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled 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. The word Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. 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. 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. 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! 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. Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared A common example of this would be SOS, which is the internationally recognised distress signal in morse code to call for help. Ball lightning. In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. _._. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had /-.-. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. Hence we have: It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. They included Palestinian, Swiss, German and British passengers, a diplomatic courier and the crew: the pilot Reginald Cooke, 44; first officer Norman Hilton Cooke, 39; radiotelegraph operator Dennis Harmer, 27; second officer Donald Checklin, 27; and Iris Evans. [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". . 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. 20 passengers and crew were lost. / -.. / . the sign off for a Morse code message is AR. STENDEC and Stardust have 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. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name Perhaps STENDEC was an abbreviation for a much longer message, an acronym sent in a hurry due to being in a crunch for time. After the third time, communications ceased, and the aircraft disappeared, never reaching its final destination. just confirmed his time of arrival? that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. British . Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy / / . For a more detailed explanation - - . 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. "Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash" 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. (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.). It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. However, while the aircraft was unpressurized, its crew had been supplied with oxygen. State Sen. 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