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. / -.. / . Very good writeup! Since the programme transmitted we have received literally hundreds Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse 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. [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting 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. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had
full message sent at 17.41 hrs was as follows: Ok, so that covers the theory of the mysterious phrase, but it doesnt answer the mystery of what happened to the plane. 'ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs STENDEC' Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. / -.. / . So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. . radio operator in Santiago, where the plane was due to land. 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. The actual
The operator understood that Star Dust intended to land in four minutes, but the final word, STENDEC, confused him. After the third time, communications ceased, and the aircraft disappeared, never reaching its final destination. Its certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. "Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although / - / . / -.-. 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. It was also, as OP says, unpressurized, so that passengers as well as crew had to breathe supplemental oxygen through masks while above 15,000 feet. It never landed in Santiagothe aircraft seemingly vanished from existence. Read on these 10 strange mysteries that were solved later. The Army unit also discovered that the wheels on the plane were in an upward position, so the crew had not attempted an emergency landing. / -.-. Blast From the Past: The North Texas Skeptic, May 1999, Republican Senator Claims 'The Left' Will Start a Civil War Unless Federal Highway System Abolished, A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline, Popular Instagram Photographer Revealed as AI Fraud, Cutting IRS Funding Is a Gift to Americas Wealthiest Tax Evaders, Record 6,542 Guns Intercepted at US Airport Security in 22, Interview With Oklahoma State Sen. Nathan Dahm, US: Russia Has Committed Crimes Against Humanity in Ukraine, Joel Cummins Umphreys McGee Keyboard Rig - January 2023 [VIDEO], Oklahoma Judge Transfers Lesbian Moms Parental Rights to Her Sons Sperm Donor. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) Firstly, despite it being easy to rearrange STENDEC quickly in English text, doing the same in morse code is much more complex and highly implausible due to the nature of the language. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. of mystery, confusion and intrigue ever since. One was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. 20 passengers and crew were lost. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? Could it be that Stardust were informing Los Cerrillos that they were on course for Rodelillo Airfield near Valparaiso instead, diverging from their original route? Listener Feedback: Provisos, Addenda, and Quid Pro Quos - Skeptoid Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. Full video here breaking down the story -, A subreddit dedicated to the unresolved mysteries of the world. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic This is, in my opinion, the most plausible theory of what STENDEC was supposed to be. on initials. Really neat, I hadn't heard of this before. 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. [10], In 1998, two Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungatoabout 60mi (100km) west-southwest of Mendoza, and about 50mi (80km) east of Santiagofound the wreckage of a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, along with twisted pieces of metal and shreds of clothing, in the Tupungato Glacier at an elevation of 15,000ft (4,600m). Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given / -. 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. 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. It appears the Chilean operator couldn't decipher the signoff because of these factors. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. 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. / -.. / . People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was If they wanted to convey distress, they would have sent an SOS., Misinterpretation Theory For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. Part of the problem was that BSAA was operating types of aircraft that were at the extreme limits of their capabilities. of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. The captain, Reginald Cook, was an experienced former Royal Air Force pilot with combat experience during the Second World War, as were his first officer, Norman Hilton Cook, and second officer, Donald Checklin. the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never
1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. 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. The misunderstanding of their actual location reminds me of Uruguayan Flight 571, the subject of the book and movie Alive! 1947 BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust accident - Wikipedia At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. The site had been difficult to reach. Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. In 1947 the official report into Stardusts disappearance had this 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. The radio operator misheard the signal. 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. this method of communication. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts, STENDEC - The Worlds Most Mysterious Morse Code, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_(RAF). But before that, to help understand the The airliner will stay lost for 51 years until 1998 when mountaineers find parts of the wreckage on Mount Tupungato 50 miles east from the planes destination, Santiago. [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. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme page. This gives us the very
To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. Things like air turbulance (in my case, rough seas) also affect that rythm. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. / - /. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. [14] Human remains were also recovered, including three torsos, a foot in an ankle boot and a manicured hand. 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. STENDEC - Solved?! 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. radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer
and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. 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. STENDEC Solved by John L. Scherer. 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. Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. 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. This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name
which is identical - although with different spacings - to EC. All rights reserved. / - (Descent) One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! that Morse transmissions were closing down. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. _.. . This theory is an easy one to break apart. [19][20] This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation. When flying at high altitudes, oxygen molecules are harder to inhale, and if a plane is not pressurized, it can lead to hypoxia, a condition which can impair or even completely destroy your ability to function. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) - LGF Pages 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. With the word not existing in international morse code, or any spoken language at the time, interpreting STENDEC has led to many varying theories. 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. to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. - - . . (STENDEC) But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. [22] Alternatively, the Morse spelling for "STENDEC" is one character off from instead spelling VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, 110 kilometers north of Santiago. They had been . You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. -, Press J to jump to the feed. Another noticeable similarity is that the word STENDEC has some resemblance to the word STARDUST, and perhaps Harmer misspelled the name of the aircraft in morse code. Americas owner-flown aircraft enthusiasts and active-pilot resource, delivered to your inbox! Seems very unlikely. A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. 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. 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. 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. 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. / / . Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy - / . End Credits. 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. Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared I remember him in his RAF uniform during the war. 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. Thanks SK. [5] The passengers were one woman and five men of Palestinian, Swiss, German and British nationality. After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. . . Ball lightning is a potentially dangerous atmospheric electrical phenomenon. The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. The Stardust could not be raised and no wreckage could be found. - - . Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. Something like "We're completely screwed.". All Rights Reserved You're right! But my maternal great . /-.-. 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. 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. - / . 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. 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. It wasnt until 1998 that a group of Argentine mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato, approximately 50 miles east of Santiago, stumbled upon wreckage from the crash. based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. 1. USGS. / -. 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. Furthermore, why would they put ATTENTION at the end of the transmission instead of the beginning? With the disappearance occurring less than a month after the now infamous Roswell incident, unexplained events such as a vanishing plane were easily connected to the possibility of alien interference. The Lancastrian aircraft, with eleven people on board, never did arrive at Santiago Airport and its location remained unsolved for over fifty years. 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. 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. 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.". 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. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. 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. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in
STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. That was
know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of
selection of the ideas. 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. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had
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. - . You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. SAR Technology - Aviation Cold Case Response Yet one mystery remains:. 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. 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. . For a more detailed explanation
Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . Possibly because he was finishing 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. Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. In Mendoza, one startling picture published in the city's newspapers aroused particular curiosity. / -.-. In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. 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.