Is that the one where they all started eating each other? By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. It was underpowered, unstable in yaw on the ground (pilots of the Tudor got used to feeding in power at different levels from each engine on takeoff to prevent the beast from departing uncontrollably off the side of the runway), unpleasant to handle in the air, prone to leaks of all kinds, and an ergonomic and maintenance nightmare. to say on the subject:The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. [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. 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. Very good writeup! / -.. / . That would leave just "END", sandwiched between a signal attracting 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. 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. attention, and another signing off. / - /. The Star Dust Mystery Damn Interesting 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. Background At 5:41 p.m., a Chilean Morse code radio operator for the Los Cerrillos Airport received a message. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. 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. 10 of the Strangest Mysteries That Were Solved Later - Unbelievable Facts 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. - . / . 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. A solution to the word "STENDEC" has not been found. They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. The North Texas Skeptic 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. 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? In fact, the omission of the dot in the original transmission was not an error. But before that, to help understand the 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. 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. 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. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. Something like "We're completely screwed.". 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 disappearance of the plane - coupled with its final strange The unit had to finish quickly. Since the programme transmitted we have received literally hundreds Mysteries 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #1 Posted January 31, 2001 next set. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. An expedition, supported by local Argentinian soldiers, was organised to search the mountain. Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. - / . The misunderstanding of their actual location reminds me of Uruguayan Flight 571, the subject of the book and movie Alive! 1 Pan Am Flight 7 Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? 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. to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. You're right! Theories include everything from sabotage to aliens. / - /. / -. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie. The central route via Mendoza was considered to be the quickest of the three, yet potentially the most dangerous depending on weather conditions. was that a small rearrangement of the dots and dashes (for example An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. 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. "[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. At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. Their curse was too much sky. This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. The Theory between the letters). "Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago of Stardusts radio operator. UFO magazine. / - / . Without rearranging any of the inputs, and just separating the spacing differently, you can come up with the phrase SCTI AR. BBC2 9:00pm Thursday 2nd November 2000, Although science has solved Morse '._._.' The Morse for AR is.- /.-. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based The most widely speculated of these phrases is the following: Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash Landing. 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 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. The Mystery of STENDEC - Skeptoid The actual Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. . Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. the ETA. The flight was conducted in zero-visibility conditions, so its unlikely the crew had any idea their plane was about to impact a mountainside. In 1998, over 50 years after the disappearance of Stardust, a group of Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato, one of the highest mountains in the Andes and roughly 50 miles east of Santiago, stumbled upon the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of the Lancastrian. Their discovery revived interest in solving the mystery of what had happened to Flight CS59 and its 11 passengers and crew. (STENDEC) [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. Furthermore, why would they put ATTENTION at the end of the transmission instead of the beginning? In January 2000, they located the site and began recovering debris. This button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. This gives us the very The chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. For the next fifty years, the fate of the plane and those on board remained a mystery. 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. Once again, no distress signal was received. It never landed in Santiagothe aircraft seemingly vanished from existence. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. The mystery became an obsession of the innumerable "Bermuda Triangle" crackpots, who attribute almost all unexplained losses of ships and aircraft within a 500,000 square-mile area to paranormal activity. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . 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. STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish 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 theory hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. Morse '._._.' enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. [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. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. 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. by John . 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. Really neat, I hadn't heard of this before. In 1950, one of these, Star Girl, had no fewer than 83 passengers and crew crammed into it on a charter flight from Dublin to Llandow, a low-cost airport near Cardiff in Wales. 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. People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. STENDEC - Solved?! 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. STENDEC." That was the last communication sent in Morse code on August 2, 1947, by an Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft flying for British South American Airways from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile. 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. 2023 Little Green Footballs I remember him in his RAF uniform during the war. (STENDEC) Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. 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. Ice crystals accumulated on a probe, causing it to give incorrect speed readings and the autopilot system to disengage. / -.-. [14] Human remains were also recovered, including three torsos, a foot in an ankle boot and a manicured hand. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. 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. No distress transmission was received; the last broadcast from the aircraft was a routine position check, about two hours before it should have reached its destination. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code | When a plane goes missing over the Andes Mountains in 1947, it's unusual last message leaves the world with a 70 year old mystery still waiting to be solved. Then nothing. 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. Morse transmissions prior to picking up voice communication. this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). This sentence now makes perfect sense, with Harmer announcing that they were expected to arrive in Santiago at 17:45 hours, at Los Cerrillos Airport. The Disappearance of Flight CS-59. The "STENDEC" Mystery 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. 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. [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. Full video here breaking down the story - STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code [Transcript From Video Below] How police solved the mystery of a VHS tape depicting sexual assault 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. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with - / . 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. 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. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! [11] The head of BSAA, Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, personally directed an unsuccessful five-day search. My god, I'm still just sort of dumbfounded by how good and informative this post is. . While the fate of Star Dust had finally been solved, remaining in its wake was still the mystery of the crews final messageSTENDEC. Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code - Reddit However, while the aircraft was unpressurized, its crew had been supplied with oxygen. It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. [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. Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #3 Posted February 8, 2001 previous set The word STENDEC means: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-Landing.". 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. The site had been difficult to reach. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. Furthermore, 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 message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. 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. They were in a remarkable state of preservation; freeze-dried by icy winds, the remains had not suffered bacteriological decay. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. It would be like ending a story with once upon a time., Conclusion - we are unable to respond to further suggestions about the meaning They had been . So mysterious was the disappearance of the plane - coupled with it's final strange message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. / . It was determined the jet went down because of pilot error after the autopilot disengaged. Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. out, but seems unlikely. 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. But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? The Avro Lancastrian began its life as a British Lancaster bomber in World War II. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. 2023 Madavor Media, LLC. of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. 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. Why would the operator say end? message from Star Dust -. STENDEC is the same Morse as SCTI AR if you don't consider any spacing between characters. - / . Sometimes These Enigmas Never Decipher. case G-AGWH) rather than the romantic names airlines gave them. As mentioned in a previous theory, morse code can be easily misinterpreted if incorrectly spaced or misheard by the receiver. Then nothing. Already a member? Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. just confirmed his time of arrival? STENDEC/STAR DUST Theory It has to be this one in my opinion. know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of transmitted by the plane, reporting their position and intended 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. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. The actual 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 site had been difficult to reach. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. British . One final mystery lay in the last message sent out by the Star Dust. 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. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. But would they repeat AR too, not just the airport code, for clarity? simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from 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. However, the mystery of the final radio message remains. some similarities both in Morse code and English /- /.-/ .-./ -../ ..-/ / - (Stardust) That part of the puzzle wouldnt be solved until half a century later. communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. Was there a connection? In Britain, the news led to a hunt for surviving relatives. '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. 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. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes
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