Author:
Boyd Percy
[ Edit | View ]
|
Date Posted: 02:09:39 02/09/15 Mon
>Another column lifted from the paper.
>
>-----------------------
>
>As of this writing on Monday, no real trace of the
>missing Malasian 370 Boeing 777 has turned up, despite
>a huge effort in the Indian Ocean west of Australia.
>There is intense media coverage, and the disappearance
>of the airliner is still full of mystery -- and it may
>well remain that way for some time.
>
>I've been following this story more closely than I do
>some things in the news, and it particularly ground at
>me one day last week when some network reporter made
>the comment that "No airliner has just disappeared
>like this before."
>
>That was a stupid statement, and it was just plain
>wrong. It has happened -- just not recently.
>
>One of the more curious of aviation mysteries was the
>disappearance of three different British South Amerian
>Airways airlines in the late 1940s.
>
>Perhaps the most famous of the three was the mystery
>of the Star Dust (all of the planes bore
>names.) On August 2, 1947, Star Dust vanished
>during a flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, Chile.
>A comprehensive search of a wide area was fruitless,
>and the incident was left as a vast mystery.
>
>A secondary mystery in the Star Dust incident
>was the last word received from the airliner, send in
>Morse code by its radio operator, a single word,
>repeated several times: "STENDEC." What did that mean?
>No one knows, and despite many theories raised over
>the years, no one still knows for sure; it seems
>likely that no one will ever know.
>
>But one of the theories that endured for many years
>was that Star Dust had been taken up by a UFO
>-- in fact, a UFO magazine many years ago was named
>STENDEC after the incident. (And yes, true believers
>have already voiced the theory that UFOs were
>responsible for Malaysian 370's disappearance.)
>
>On January 30, 1948 another British South American
>Airways airliner, Star Tiger, disappeared
>without a trace between the Azores and Bermuda, in
>what many have now designated "The Bermuda Triangle."
>Twenty-six airplanes searched for nearly a thousand
>hours, but no trace of the airplane ever turned up.
>Among the passengers was Air Marshal Sir Arthur
>Coningham, a hero of World War II. Coningham's death
>shared the front page of the Jnuary 31 edition of the
>New York Times along with the news of the
>assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the death of
>Orville Wright.
>
>Then, on January 17, 1949, a third British South
>Amerian Airways airliner, similar to the other two,
>Star Ariel, disappeared between Bermuda and
>Jamaica. In spite of an extensive search, no signs of
>wreckage, debris, or oil slicks was ever found.
>
>British South American Airways didn't have a lot of
>luck with their planes -- there were four other fatal
>crashes in the five years of their existence.
>
>The disappearance of Star Tiger, Star Ariel,
>and especially Star Dust were one of aviation's
>enduring mysteries for more than half a century, and
>as noted above, UFOs were but one theory.
>
>At least we now know what happened to Star
>Dust. In the last 1990s a pair of Argentine
>mountain climbers discovered wreckage from the plane
>in a glacier on Mount Tupungato in the Argentine
>Andes. Apparently when the plane hit the mountain, it
>set off an avalanche that buried the wreckage
>immediately; it stayed buried until the glacier
>started spitting out the wreckage many years later.
>The fate of Star Tiger and Star Ariel
>remains a mystery.
>
>This is not the 1940s; radar and satellites keep much
>better track of airliners than they used to, so the
>disappearance of Malaysian 370 is a huge mystery. But
>the last words from the plane, "All right. Good
>night." leave open as many questions as "STENDEC."
I just read that the wreckage of a plane that crashed in the Chilean Andes in 1961 was discovered by climbers. Who knows how many other lost planes may be discovered by pure chance.
|
Feedback: 