attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years, giving rise to various conspiracy theories about its disappearance. The The Morse for AR is.- /.-. - / . Almost certainly Star Tiger ran out of fuel before reaching Bermuda, a consequence of stronger-than-predicted upper-level winds. It seems 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. 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. 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. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. / -. the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio 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. "Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago Scherer, J. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. - - . By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. Checklin never married and his immediate family is now dead, so she and her brothers must decide whether to bring the body back to Britain. 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. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . of the station they wish to contact. Yet one mystery remains:. / -.. / . the last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer
Also, in the 1947 report, the oxygen system was noted as being fully charged, along with nine emergency bottles before leaving Buenos Aires. that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based Though it had as its General Manager a pilot of exceptional distinction -- Air Vice Marshal D.C.T. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! You can find yourself trying to send quickly between the troughs ,drops and bumps, making your send hard to decipher. 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. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. ATLANTA (AP) The woman flying out of Philadelphias airport last year remembered to pack snacks, prescription medicine and a cellphone in her handbag. Mysteries 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. which is identical - although with different spacings - to EC. Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images. . 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. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. 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. People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. 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. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the 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. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. 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. STENDEC - Solved?! 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). On July 3, a rancher at Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have found a UFO crash site with four alien bodies. In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. [10] The Chilean Air Force radio operator at Santiago airport described this transmission as coming in "loud and clear" but very fast; as he did not recognise the last word, he requested clarification and heard "STENDEC" repeated twice in succession before contact with the aircraft was lost. the disappearance of the plane - coupled with its final strange But what was Jon Stewart asks when we will have enough guns -- watch to the end to watch him absolutely stick the landing. 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. very close to the airport, and one pilot and radio operator who A more plausible theory is that the message was misinterpreted due to a spacing error in the Morse code. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Harris Joel is a founding member and the resident keyboard wizard for Umphreys McGee AND a long-time Phish fan! For over fifty years the disappearance ranked as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and a lively and inventive mythology grew up around the incident. 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. 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. The theory about it being a code for the airport makes a lot more sense. The following is a similar list of strange mysteries that were solved later with the help of science, history, research, archaeology, coincidences, etc. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name
See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. [16] If the airliner, which had to cross the Andes mountain range at 24,000 feet (7,300m), had entered the jet-stream zonewhich in this area normally blows from the west and south-west, resulting in the aircraft encountering a headwindthis would have significantly decreased the aircraft's ground speed. STENDEC - The World's Most Mysterious Morse Code - Reddit STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. STENDEC" That wasthe last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. operator to scramble the message. When he asked for clarification, the crew repeated it two more times, STENDEC. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. . NOVA Online | Vanished! | Theories (Feb. 8, 2001) - PBS 1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. Furthermore, why would they put ATTENTION at the end of the transmission instead of the beginning? 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. But would they repeat AR too, not just the airport code, for clarity? Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in
Morse '._._.' But my maternal great . 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. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. The Lancastrian's vanishing act happened at a time of considerable political turmoil in South America. Listener Feedback: Provisos, Addenda, and Quid Pro Quos - Skeptoid End Credits. 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. In 1947 the official report into Stardusts disappearance had this Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared 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. Its meaning, however, is astonishingly simple. A Spanish magazine about UFOs appropriated STENDEK as its title, and at least one U.S. comic book illustrated the disappearance of the Stardust, pondering the meaning of STENDEC for its fascinated readers. 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. British . Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in 1998, when mountain climbers in the Andes found the planes Rolls-Royce engine. 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? 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. So mysterious was 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. / - / . It was hard work at this elevation, and the Army had supplies for only thirty-six hours. Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the
The radio operator meant to say Stardust. "Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although The public, still reeling from the now-famous flying saucer incident in Roswell, New Mexico, a few weeks earlier, went wild with theories, speculating everything from sabotage to alien abduction. I couldnt find a source for this, but according to theorists online, this was a known phrase for allied fighter pilots in WWII for if their plane was about to crash land. Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). 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. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. 'Star Dust' did, however, broadcast a last, cryptic, Morse message; "STENDEC", which was received by Santiago Airport at 17:41 hrs - just four minutes before it's planned landing time. 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. 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. SAR
Investigators concluded that the crew, flying in a snowstorm against a powerful jet stream, had become confused about their location and believed they were closer to Santiago than they actually were. 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. / -.-. They hadn't passed Curico. Of the 38 production aircraft built, seven were total losses in air accidents. a new clue the truth is we will never know for sure what that final 2023 Little Green Footballs 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. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name
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. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Harris Joel is a founding member and the resident keyboard wizard for Umphreys McGee AND a long-time Phish fan!