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[1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. INITIALS With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. Miracle in the Andes is an excellent book by the way. STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became the name of a Spanish It has taken two years to find relatives and carry out the necessary DNA tests. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? That part of the puzzle wouldnt be solved until half a century later. The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible. "[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. Scherer, J. / -.. / . use SOS, the internationally accepted distress signal? [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. The investigators concluded that the aircraft had not stalled. full message sent at 17.41 hrs was as follows: 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. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. 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. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? STENDEC is the same Morse as SCTI AR if you don't consider any spacing between characters. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. / -.. / . In 1947 the official report into Stardusts disappearance had this 2023 Madavor Media, LLC. . 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. 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. The - / . A few days after Christmas in 2015, a woman in Sydney's south-west was contacted by police with shocking news. 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. That's also how Carole Lombard died. 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. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. 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. The Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. of the station they wish to contact. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. 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 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. 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. Plane and Pilot expands upon the vast base of knowledge and experience from aviations most reputable influencers to inspire, educate, entertain and inform. - / . simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). radio operator getting his planes name wrong on 3 occasions. Star Dust, registration G-AGWH, an Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, departed Buenos Aires for Santiago at 13.46 on 2 August 1947. STENDEC - Solved?! . 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. (STENDEC) Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse As it turns out, STENDEC is an anagram of the word descent. One popular theory is that the crew, flying at 24,000 feet in an unpressurized aircraft, suffered from hypoxia. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. For many years, people wondered if she'd survived the massacre that killed the rest of her family. 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. To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. [23], "Stendec" redirects here. An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. Anagram Theory Similarly, another Morse expert has pointed out that to attract Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. 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. Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C. _ . The radio operator misheard the signal. [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. on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was . French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. 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. 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. 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. /- (ST) 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. 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. As mentioned in a previous theory, morse code can be easily misinterpreted if incorrectly spaced or misheard by the receiver. In Britain, the news led to a hunt for surviving relatives. CONCLUSION 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 letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . The Avro Lancastrian was a civilian version of the wartime Lancaster heavy bomber. 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. - . The central route via Mendoza was considered to be the quickest of the three, yet potentially the most dangerous depending on weather conditions. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. / . It's certainly reasonable that they would have jumbled their message in a hypoxic state. 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. very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who But my maternal great . In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. 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. by John . / . I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. This button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. 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. A 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. / -.-. . Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the total expected wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in Explanations based in Morse code 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. It also seems clear that the message was not anticipating a crash, The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. close to an understanding of the message. - /. Something like "We're completely screwed.". As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. [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". Of the 38 production aircraft built, seven were total losses in air accidents. know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of With that in mind, and the fact that the operator himself mentioned that Harmer sent the message extremely quickly, its likely that this was the message after all. But there are no old, bold pilots. The word simply has no meaning in any language, not even in Morse code. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Without an explanation the case remains a mystery. and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. / - / . attention, and another signing off. Sometimes human error leads to some of the most interesting mysteries but generally when you hear hooves you want to think horses before you think zebras. Star Dust crashed into Mount Tupungato, killing all aboard and burying itself in snow and ice.[1][2]. in other words 'EC' without the space. (STENDEC). made with the control tower at Santiago. The full. You're right! Really neat, I hadn't heard of this before. / -. A common example of this would be SOS, which is the internationally recognised distress signal in morse code to call for help. 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. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is That would leave just "END", sandwiched between a signal attracting In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. Read on these 10 strange mysteries that were solved later. the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never up sign. The word STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became. clear that STENDEC is not what the message was meant to say. 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. 56K views 8 months ago #Disasters #History For over 50 years the fate of Flight CS-59 remained a mystery. Discussion It has to be this one in my opinion. From this time Seems very unlikely. Sign in to continue reading. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. The operator understood that Star Dust intended to land in four minutes, but the final word, STENDEC, confused him. This button leads to the main index of LGF Pages, our user-submitted articles. 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 was a British diplomatic courier, a King's Messenger. - - . 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. Ice crystals accumulated on a probe, causing it to give incorrect speed readings and the autopilot system to disengage. communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was 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. 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. 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. 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. three times.STENDEC/Stardust On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. Part of the problem was that BSAA was operating types of aircraft that were at the extreme limits of their capabilities. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. 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. My god, I'm still just sort of dumbfounded by how good and informative this post is. Her sisters, boyfriend and sons knew nothing of her illness until suddenly, during a family gathering in October 2018 at a diner in Reading The Online Photographer lead me to this article. most of the mysteries surrounding Stardusts disappearance, At 5:41 p.m., a Chilean Morse code radio operator for the Los Cerrillos Airport received a message. 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. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in 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. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. Furthermore, Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. 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. 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. hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and 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. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. 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. 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. of the above, please follow the link to Martin Colwell's website here - Not understanding the word "STENDEC" he queried it 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. All further calls were The disappearance and the odd message have remained a mystery for over sixty years. 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. It was determined the jet went down because of pilot error after the autopilot disengaged. 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. Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the Was there a connection? But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. _._. They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. 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. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . _. In morse code, there are various short-hand acronyms and abbreviations which help convey much longer messages quickly. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. tower aircraft now descending entering cloud") / / . A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. What was experienced radio operator Dennis Harmer trying to say? [5] The passengers were one woman and five men of Palestinian, Swiss, German and British nationality. [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. 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 actual Morse code which the Chilean Operator believed she received was: S T E N D E C As for the Avro Tudor, its safety record was deplorable even at the time. Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. This theory is an easy one to break apart. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. Again, this is the same as ST, only with different spacing.- (V) Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? 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. 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. And even less likely that the same morse dyslexia would be repeated / -.. / . How police solved the mystery of a VHS tape depicting sexual assault. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. All rights reserved. The crew of Stardust, including the radio operator Harmer, had all served in the RAF previously during WWII, so if this phrase is true, then it is possible that they were all familiar with the term and used it in a time of crisis. 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. 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. 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. Martin Colwell's theory on the mystery "STENDEC" the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . Mystery solved. method of signalling a late arrival amongst RAF radio operators.. / - / .- / .-.. / .- / - / . [12], A report by an amateur radio operator who claimed to have received a faint SOS signal from Star Dust initially raised hopes that there might have been survivors,[11] but all subsequent attempts over the years to find the vanished aircraft failed. this method of communication. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). So mysterious was Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. 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. 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". 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. 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. Ok, so that covers the theory of the mysterious phrase, but it doesnt answer the mystery of what happened to the plane. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! It would have been As it turns out, STENDEC is an anagram of the word "descent." One popular theory is that the crew, flying at 24,000 feet in an unpressurized aircraft, suffered from hypoxia. Then nothing. 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. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) By Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie Weird December 2010 Views: 31,837 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. The radio operator, Dennis Harmer, also had a record of wartime as well as civilian service. of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. much harder in Morse code.-.. / . The Theory / -.-. Background The unit had to finish quickly. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. . A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had They had been . Their discovery revived interest in solving the mystery of what had happened to Flight CS59 and its 11 passengers and crew. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. 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. 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. 1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago.