It was the manicured hand of a young woman lying among the ice and rocks. I remember him in his RAF uniform during the war. [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. of Stardusts radio operator. STENDECANAGRAMS Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. / -.. / . It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. The Foreign Office yesterday confirmed that after initially unsuccessful attempts, Argentinian scientists have found close family matches. - /. And finally, there seems to be no reason to transmit the planes USGS. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code
STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. 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. / - /. 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. But in the absence of This is a personal family mystery that got solved a few years ago, so nothing exciting that would have gotten media attention, haha. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. 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. which is identical - although with different spacings - to EC. 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 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. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. 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. [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. The first letter has to be V, and the rest just fall into place-ALP-a perfect match in Morse. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. You're right! It would have been
The STENDEC Puzzle | Science 2.0 Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. 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. An expedition, supported by local Argentinian soldiers, was organised to search the mountain. STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish in other words 'EC' without the space. 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. . 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. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. For one, call signs for all BSAA flights in the 1940s began with star. Its unlikely that this would have been a point of confusion for Harmer, especially given that STENDEC wasnt a word. 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 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. _.. . The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. / -.-. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had
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DNA clues reveal 55-year-old secrets behind crash of the Star Dust 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. . On board the British South American Airways flight were five crew members and six passengers, including the Captain, Commander Reginald J. Cook, an experienced and former RAF pilot during World War II. The radio operator misheard the signal. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . code. With morse code being a binary combination of dots and dashes, something as simple as one or two incorrect inputs can make a drastic difference to how a word is interpreted. If they wanted to convey distress, they would have sent an SOS., Misinterpretation Theory French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. tower aircraft now descending entering cloud") And similarly why would an operator say ETA LATE when he had only that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based / - / . They were in a remarkable state of preservation; freeze-dried by icy winds, the remains had not suffered bacteriological decay. It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". Things like air turbulance (in my case, rough seas) also affect that rythm. [6], A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. 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. Star Dust, registration G-AGWH, an Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, departed Buenos Aires for Santiago at 13.46 on 2 August 1947. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name
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. - we are unable to respond to further suggestions about the meaning In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. "[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. / -.-. It has to be this one in my opinion. Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. / -.. / . 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 chances of all of these failing are extremely low, so the theory of hypoxia and the anagram has been ruled out by many. Mysteries Of Flight: The Curious Case Of Pan Am Flight 914, Fond Farewell to a Titan: The Antonov An-225, Plane & Pilot Survey: Pilots and Politics, Accident Brief: Piper PA28R Crash In Georgia. [3][pageneeded], Star Dust carried six passengers and a crew of five on its final flight. But would they repeat AR too, not just the airport code, for clarity? A person suffering hypoxia may possibly make the same mistake consistently three times in succession but is very unlikely to create an anagram of the intended word. 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 letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . 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. flew at this time reports that it was common to inform the airport 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. Part of the problem was that BSAA was operating types of aircraft that were at the extreme limits of their capabilities. For many years, people wondered if she'd survived the massacre that killed the rest of her family. With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight.
NOVA Online | Vanished! | Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. 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. They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced Why would the operator say end? 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. The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . much harder in Morse code.-.. / . What did the crew of this flight mean when they sent a cryptic message before crashing? 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. Discussion The word simply has no meaning in any language, not even in Morse code. INITIALS know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of
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More Mysterious Disappearances That Were Later Solved After getting the boot from BSAA, he launched his own fly-by-night airline, Airflight Ltd., using two Tudors he'd picked up cheaply and one of which he flew himself. /-.-. Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. /- (ST) [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. / - /. STENDEC and Stardust have Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. Five of the eight British victims have been identified. Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. Furthermore, But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? Similarly, another Morse expert has pointed out that to attract Thanks SK. The names of the victims were known. This gives us the very
People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. 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. Very good writeup!
Listener Feedback: Provisos, Addenda, and Quid Pro Quos - Skeptoid - . most of the mysteries surrounding Stardusts disappearance, Thanks SK. Anagram Theory That's also how Carole Lombard died. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. Improperly loaded, it crashed on landing, killing 80 of the people on board -- at the time, the worst air disaster in world history. As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. However, while the aircraft was unpressurized, its crew had been supplied with oxygen. 1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. Below we include a The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source message from Star Dust - "E.T.A. In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded.