the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never
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. 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. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. 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. But in the absence of Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the
The Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. British . 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. Morse code experts we have consulted believe that it is highly unlikely normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name
For the next fifty years, the fate of the plane and those on board remained a mystery. The weather on the day consisted of snowstorms in the Andes Mountains with moderate to intense turbulence, whilst visual contact with the ground would have been extremely low and unfit for flying. / -.-. 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. Things like air turbulance (in my case, rough seas) also affect that rythm. Then nothing. 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. And if there was any meaning to it, it wasnt in regards to the crash. out, but seems unlikely. Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. 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"). 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. The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code - Reddit As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa_EU5_gWrA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Star_Dust_accident#cite_note-SAR_Technology_-_Aviation_Cold_Case_Response-22, https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/a-pilots-last-words-stendec/, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vanished/stendec.html, https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/vanished.shtml, https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/05/stendec-mystery/, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/06/owenbowcott1v, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jul/08/2, http://www.sartechnology.ca/sartechnology/ST_STENDEC_ColdCase.htm, http://www.ntskeptics.org/2010/2010december/december2010.pdf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosigns_for_Morse_code, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/06/owenbowcott1. "[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. The word 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. The Theory STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie Weird December 2010 Views: 31,881 Tweet 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. [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". 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. 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. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled 56K views 8 months ago #Disasters #History For over 50 years the fate of Flight CS-59 remained a mystery. 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. which is identical - although with different spacings - to EC. 1947 BSAA Star Dust accident - "STENDEC" : UnsolvedMysteries - reddit Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse What did the crew of this flight mean when they sent a cryptic message before crashing? on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was 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. A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. [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. made with the control tower at Santiago. The Mystery of STENDEC - YouTube To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). . And finally, there seems to be no reason to transmit the planes Of the 38 production aircraft built, seven were total losses in air accidents. Explaining the unexplained: 10 famous mysteries solved It appears the Chilean operator couldn't decipher the signoff because of these factors. In morse code, there are various short-hand acronyms and abbreviations which help convey much longer messages quickly. This is, in my opinion, the most plausible theory of what STENDEC was supposed to be. STENDEC and STAR DUST are coded similarly in both English and Morse code, causing some to theorize that Harmer sent one when he actually meant the other. Five of the eight British victims have been identified. The unit had to finish quickly. 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. (STENDEC) But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. . Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew 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. code. . At 5:41 p.m., a Chilean Morse code radio operator for the Los Cerrillos Airport received a message. 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 Theory At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. 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 ETA. 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. 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. The mystery of the word STENDEC took its place among the great unsolved cases so beloved in the lore of urban legendry. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. 2023 Little Green Footballs 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. 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. / / -.-. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. Part of the problem was that BSAA was operating types of aircraft that were at the extreme limits of their capabilities. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. It's reported as looking luminous and spherical, and can vary in diameter - from pea-sized to several metres long. reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given I think the misinterpretation of the airport code is def the most plausible. It was the manicured hand of a young woman lying among the ice and rocks. It's possible that the desire to descend as soon as possible to a level at which the passengers could breathe normally may have factored into Star Dust's premature departure from a safe crossing altitude. Then nothing. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? 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. The accident aircraft, an Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, was built as constructor's number 1280 for the Argentine Ministry of Supply to carry thirteen passengers, and first flew on 27 November 1945. 10 'Unsolved' Mysteries That Have Been Solved | HowStuffWorks of mystery, confusion and intrigue ever since. 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. 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. . The Chilean radio operator at Santiago states that the Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. 2023 Madavor Media, LLC. Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) - LGF Pages The actual Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C By Plane and Pilot Updated December 12, 2019 Save Article. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? They had been . 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. - / . This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in