Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as 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. recognized signoff or 'end of message' signal was 'AR' (with no space Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. (These individuals ignore the fact that almost any other triangle of a similar size, drawn anywhere else in the North Atlantic, would yield a similar if not greater number of disappearances.). The Star Dust Mystery Damn Interesting 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. Not understanding the word "STENDEC" he queried it / -. STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. With the word not existing in international morse code, or any spoken language at the time, interpreting STENDEC has led to many varying theories. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The Lancastrian was an unpressurized aircraft, meaning that the crew and passengers could have been subject to hypoxia had their oxygen system failed, and so some suggest that this may have led to Harmer sending parts of his final message in a confused state. Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. 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. 5 STENDEC Another mystery involving a plane played out on August 2, 1947. of Stardusts radio operator. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) Fiddling with Morse code seems to offer the best chance of getting 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 fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. out, but seems unlikely. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. word is meaningless in almost every language, and trying to use Really neat, I hadn't heard of this before. 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. the sign off for a Morse code message is AR. NOVA Online | Vanished! | 1947 Official Accident Report Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. This gives us the very / -. - . The Morse for AR is.- /.-. was that a small rearrangement of the dots and dashes (for example 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. 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. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. 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. Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. 1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. Mistakenly believing they had already cleared the mountain tops, they started their descent when they were in fact still behind cloud-covered peaks. it as an acronym or an abreviation yields little fruit. STENDECANAGRAMS [10] However, Star Dust never arrived, no more radio transmissions were received by the airport, and intensive efforts by both Chilean and Argentine search teams, as well as by other BSAA pilots, failed to uncover any trace of the aircraft or of the people on board. . An explanation of STENDEC .. - Fly With The Stars The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . With a diplomat on board, the press freely speculated that a bomb had exploded in mid-flight. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based 10 'Unsolved' Mysteries That Have Been Solved | HowStuffWorks But why would Harmer send such an important part of his message in a scrambled format? You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. 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. 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. What was experienced radio operator Dennis Harmer trying to say? To put it simply, Cook chose the worst route possible in consideration of the conditions, which more than likely played a key role in the planes disappearance. 1 Pan Am Flight 7 that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. 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. Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. The theory simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). The word STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became. reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given STENDEC and Stardust have / -. 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. / -.-. End Credits. If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. 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. 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. 10 'Unsolved' Mysteries That Have Been Solved. Possibly because he was finishing 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. The Disappearance of Flight CS-59. The "STENDEC" Mystery 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. /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. the hastily sent morse message gives us : We will never (STENDEC). [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 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. It has to be this one in my opinion. Weird December 2010 Views: 31,751. "Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although 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. problem, here is a website which translates English into Morse code. The trekkers had abandoned their pack mules lower down, and ascended with what they could carry. Mystery solved. The actual Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the Theories include everything from sabotage to aliens. STENDEC is the same Morse as SCTI AR if you don't consider any spacing between characters. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had / - / . (STENDEC) The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. . How police solved the mystery of a VHS tape depicting sexual assault. Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. 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. As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. 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". The Stardust incident involved British South American Airways G-AGWH. All further calls were The central route via Mendoza was considered to be the quickest of the three, yet potentially the most dangerous depending on weather conditions. between the letters). Operating as Flight CS-59, aka Star Dust, the four-engine aircraft was en route from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile, with 11 people on board. On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. On Saturday 2nd August 1947, at around 1:45pm, an Avro Lancastrian Mk.III passenger plane known as Stardust departed from Buenos Aires, Argentina to make a roughly 3 hour 45 minute trip to Santiago, Chile. / / . The operator understood that Star Dust intended to land in four minutes, but the final word, STENDEC, confused him. communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was [13], A 2000 Argentine Air Force investigation cleared Cook of any blame, concluding that the crash had resulted from "a heavy snowstorm" and "very cloudy weather", as a result of which the crew "were unable to correct their positioning". / -.. / . / -.-. up sign. 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. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) - LGF Pages 1. The Mystery of STENDEC - YouTube code. Other explanations for the appearance A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. [6] Marta Limpert, a German migr, was the only passenger known for certain to have initially boarded Star Mist in London[7] before changing aircraft in Buenos Aires to continue on to Santiago with the other passengers. The problem here though is that, even if this was the case, it would be unusual for Harmer to use a phrase which was not internationally recognised, and only specifically known to allied participants of the war. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. in other words 'EC' without the space. Sometimes These Enigmas Never Decipher. Several people have pointed out that 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. NOVA Online | Vanished! | Theories (Jan. 31, 2001) - PBS All Rights Reserved on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was [9] This leg of the flight was apparently uneventful until the radio operator (Harmer) sent a routine message in Morse code to the airport in Santiago at 5:41 pm, announcing an expected arrival of 5:45 pm. 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. You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. 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. ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. "STENDEC Solved." The North Texas Skeptic. Before this message a series of entirely routine messages had been 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. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. Thanks SK. . It even inspired a new name for a UFO magazineSTENDEK. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. NOVA Online | Vanished! | Solve the Mystery of STENDEC - /. 2023 Little Green Footballs In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from the glacial ice. They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced of Stendec. The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. Ball lightning doesn't happen very often, so it hasn't been recorded under natural conditions. . The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible. 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. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . However, the mystery of the final radio message remains. If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Ice crystals accumulated on a probe, causing it to give incorrect speed readings and the autopilot system to disengage. name at the end of a routine message. [11] The head of BSAA, Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, personally directed an unsuccessful five-day search. / -.-. In Britain, the news led to a hunt for surviving relatives. A Pilot's Last Words: "STENDEC" - Plane & Pilot Magazine In the absence of any hard evidence, numerous theories aroseincluding rumours of sabotage (compounded by the later disappearance of two other aircraft also belonging to BSAA);[13] speculation that Star Dust might have been blown up to destroy diplomatic documents being carried by the King's Messenger;[13] or even the suggestion that Star Dust had been taken or destroyed by a UFO (an idea fuelled by unresolved questions about the flight's final Morse code message). on initials. Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. [10] It has also been suggested that World War II pilots used this seemingly obscure abbreviation when an aircraft was in hazardous weather and was likely to crash, meaning "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing". What did the crew of BSAA Flight CS-59 mean when they sent and repeated the cryptic message STENDEC via Morse code seconds before crashing? To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). "STENDEC" in Morse code is: / - / . The Theory 1947 BSAA Star Dust accident - "STENDEC" : UnsolvedMysteries - reddit Plane and Pilot expands upon the vast base of knowledge and experience from aviations most reputable influencers to inspire, educate, entertain and inform. Terms of Use/Privacy Policy. Ok, so that covers the theory of the mysterious phrase, but it doesnt answer the mystery of what happened to the plane. 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. 2023 Little Green Footballs Anagram Theory / -.. / . I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. What was radio operator Dennis Harmer, a highly trained wartime and civilian operator, trying to say? It seems Below we include a The most widely speculated of these phrases is the following: Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash Landing. That's also how Carole Lombard died. tower aircraft now descending entering cloud") A quality comment reply on reddit my mind truly is blown. 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. 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. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. - / . 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. But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. Procedures for sending and receiving messages were and are standardised whether you are services or civilian operators.Regarding the 'mystery' surrounding Harmer's last transmission.Firstly, an operator always has in front of them a written copy of the message being sent. - - . [15] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have blocked visibility of the ground. Something like "We're completely screwed.". - / . Listener Feedback: Provisos, Addenda, and Quid Pro Quos - Skeptoid Martin Colwell's theory on the mystery "STENDEC" The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. The full. After the third time, communications ceased, and the aircraft disappeared, never reaching its final destination. Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. 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. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code Spektator 13K subscribers Subscribe 20K views 1 year ago #Documentary #Mystery When a plane goes missing over the Andes Mountains in 1947, its. It's reported as looking luminous and spherical, and can vary in diameter - from pea-sized to several metres long. In Mendoza, one startling picture published in the city's newspapers aroused particular curiosity. Star Dust crashed into Mount Tupungato, killing all aboard and burying itself in snow and ice.[1][2]. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code