one mystery still remains. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. However, while the aircraft was unpressurized, its crew had been supplied with oxygen. 1 Pan Am Flight 7 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 seems The Theory This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. 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! Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. The theory Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). 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. 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. Something like "We're completely screwed.". . 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. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme pageTranscriptFurther information - - . Four letter ICAO codes for airports had The site had been difficult to reach. - /. The theory is the pilot mistakenly plotted their course as if they were leaving from a different airport, and it led to them crashing into a mountain. . Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. A FINAL WORDHorizon regrets that - due to the sheer volume of correspondence [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. For a more detailed explanation The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. Thanks SK. full message sent at 17.41 hrs was as follows: / - / . this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). / -.. / . 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. 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. It also seems clear that the message was not anticipating a crash, Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. The STENDEC Puzzle Ever since BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust vanished on a flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, the ending of its final transmission - STENDEC - has continued to puzzle experts and amateurs alike. Become a member and get exclusive access to articles, contests and more! The full. [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. All rights reserved. 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. As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. 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. After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. attention, and another signing off. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. Seems very unlikely. 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. Both in London and in Buenos Aires, the pilot, Reginald Cook, had been briefed not to take this option if bad weather prevailed, but despite this advice, Cook had chosen to fly Stardust along this central route. 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! Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. 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. 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 dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . . 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. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio I think the misinterpretation of the airport code is def the most plausible. 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. 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. 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. From this time People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. . Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely And why not which is identical - although with different spacings - to EC. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. This theory is an easy one to break apart. A 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. 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. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. 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. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. 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". The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. 2023 Little Green Footballs . / -.. / . . The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. A mix of misinterpretation and a lack of recent knowledge led to the operator instead hearing the term STENDEC, which, combined with the disappearance of the plane, led to one of South Americas greatest aviation mysteries. 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. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. 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. [17] One of the pilots recalled that "we had all been warned not to enter cloud over the mountains as the turbulence and icing posed too great a threat. Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. The word simply has no meaning in any language, not even in Morse code. 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"). 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. Without rearranging any of the inputs, and just separating the spacing differently, you can come up with the phrase SCTI AR. It makes me want to write out the Morse code and play with the spacing. An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. 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. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . / . This is a personal family mystery that got solved a few years ago, so nothing exciting that would have gotten media attention, haha. It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. 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. - / . [13], A 2000 Argentine Air Force investigation cleared Cook of any blame, concluding that the crash had resulted from "a heavy snowstorm" and "very cloudy weather", as a result of which the crew "were unable to correct their positioning". But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes 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. 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. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. Bennett finished his life as a supporter, and occasional candidate, for a variety of xenophobic and extremist political parties -- a sad end for one of the world's greatest pilots and air navigators of the 1930s and 1940s. 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. Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. destroyer escort during the 70's.We were morse code trained. "[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. - / . STENDECANAGRAMS 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. 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. This was the case in 1947 when an airliner crashed in the Andes, killing everyone aboard. the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never STENDEC" That wasthe last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? Grand Duchess Anastasia (with her arm around her brother) is shown with the rest of the Russian royal family in 1913. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. 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. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code between the letters). 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. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] Thanks SK. The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible. Sign in to continue reading. 2023 Madavor Media, LLC. ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. / -. 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. [3][pageneeded], Star Dust carried six passengers and a crew of five on its final flight. Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from 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. and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. "Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. this method of communication. That part of the puzzle wouldnt be solved until half a century later. The Message That Said STENDEC "ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs. A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. It was delivered to BSAA on 12 January 1946, was registered on 16 January as G-AGWH and given the individual aircraft name "Star Dust". "STENDEC" in Morse code is: / - / . However, the mystery of the final radio message remains. - we are unable to respond to further suggestions about the meaning This is fascinating. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. Then nothing. STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. in other words 'EC' without the space. To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. 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. Is that the one where they all started eating each other? radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name 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 actual . 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. Just before the plane disappeared, it Explanations based in Morse code The last word in Star Dust's final Morse code transmission to Santiago airport, "STENDEC", was received by the airport control tower four minutes before its planned landing and repeated twice; it has never been satisfactorily explained. Full video here breaking down the story -, A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. The Avro Lancastrian was a civilian version of the wartime Lancaster heavy bomber. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). clear that STENDEC is not what the message was meant to say. (STENDEC) Understanding STENDEC has been the quest for many experienced and avid radio operators, with online forums dedicated to deciphering what Dennis Harmer was trying to say. [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. Was there a connection? by aliens. 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. [11] The head of BSAA, Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, personally directed an unsuccessful five-day search. One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. 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. The names of the victims were known. 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 disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. Ok, so that covers the theory of the mysterious phrase, but it doesnt answer the mystery of what happened to the plane. The most widely speculated of these phrases is the following: Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash Landing. But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. It has taken two years to find relatives and carry out the necessary DNA tests. / -. / . Americas owner-flown aircraft enthusiasts and active-pilot resource, delivered to your inbox! See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. 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. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. 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. Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . Discussion In fact, the omission of the dot in the original transmission was not an error. 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. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space close to an understanding of the message. message from Star Dust -. / -.. / . 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 Mystery of STENDEC - YouTube Avro Lancastrian (Public domain image)It was a story borne out all too often in the annals of aviation disasters. He flew Lancaster bombers and got medals for bringing back his aircraft one time on a wing and a prayer.". There are old pilots and there are bold pilots. Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. According to experts, if an additional space had been added between the first two letters, STENDEC would translate to: ATTENTION END END OF MESSAGE. It seems a bit redundant to say END and then END OF MESSAGE, however. Their curse was too much sky. 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. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. that Morse transmissions were closing down. 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. You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. . It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. Once again, no distress signal was received. [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. [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. The Lancastrian aircraft, with eleven people on board, never did arrive at Santiago Airport and its location remained unsolved for over fifty years. [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. 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. Mistakenly believing they had already cleared the mountain tops, they started their descent when they were in fact still behind cloud-covered peaks. Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! "STENDEC Solved." The North Texas Skeptic. 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. were all supplied with oxygen. The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew 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. 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 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. enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly STENDEC and Stardust have / -.-. . 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. Submissions should outline a mystery and provide a link to a more detailed review of the case such as a Wiki article or news report. Why would the operator say end? the operator use a calling up sign in the middle of his message? message from Star Dust - "E.T.A. 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 Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. Part of the problem was that BSAA was operating types of aircraft that were at the extreme limits of their capabilities. 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. An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). 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. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". The [19][20] This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only Scherer, J. 1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. unanswered. Believers of this theory claim it stood for something like, Stardust tank empty, no diesel, expected crash, or, Santiago tower, emergency, now descending, entering cloud. Experts on Morse code are quick to call hogwash on this theory, however, saying that the crew would have never cryptically abbreviated an important message.
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