normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name As might be inferred from that lineage, it was uncomfortable, noisy, and cramped. They had been . An explanation of STENDEC .. - Fly With The Stars Very good writeup! See link for the answer to this 63 year old question. Tragically, that wasn't the last disaster in which Bennett and the Tudor were involved. This gives us the very 1947 an British South American Airways aircraft named Star Dust disappeared, it's last message was simply "STENDEC". One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! flew at this time reports that it was common to inform the airport Jos Avery has been posting his impressive photos Twitter continues to crumble bit by bit. They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. [23], "Stendec" redirects here. otherwise it would not have been repeated three times. Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. . The crash was a result of controlled descent into terrain. Some things can be said with some degree of certainty. . Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). The dots and dash formed one letter, V: / . The names of the victims were known. 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. / / -.-. So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. . 9 Mysterious Plane Crashes - Listverse (STENDEC) "Santiago tower even navigator doesnt exactly know" communication was only possible at this time when the aircraft was Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. / -. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. were all supplied with oxygen. 1. One of the two main landing wheels was still fully inflated after a half century! On BSAA's Transatlantic services, moreover, it was operating at the ragged edge of its range when flying westbound. The unit had to finish quickly. . . that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. 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. 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. However, while the aircraft was unpressurized, its crew had been supplied with oxygen. between the letters). 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. A popular photographer who has amassed almost 30,000 followers on Instagram has admitted that his portraits are actually generated by artificial intelligence (AI). transmitted by the plane, reporting their position and intended (STENDEC). So apparently the mystery hasn't been solved, because I don't see anything in the article suggesting anyone understands what Stendec meant. As mentioned previously, the standard morse code for a distress signal is SOS, which is much easier and quicker to communicate than STENDEC. This would have explained the suddenness of its disappearance, and the fact that large pieces of wreckage had not been spotted during a wide air and land search. sent one final message in Morse code which was picked up by the 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. It's reported as looking luminous and spherical, and can vary in diameter - from pea-sized to several metres long. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. The Morse for AR is.- /.-. 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. 10 'Unsolved' Mysteries That Have Been Solved | HowStuffWorks / . Neither men were taken to the jail. You're right! 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. the operator use a calling up sign in the middle of his message? Another expose from ProPublica propublica.org Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. The mystery became an obsession of the innumerable "Bermuda Triangle" crackpots, who attribute almost all unexplained losses of ships and aircraft within a 500,000 square-mile area to paranormal activity. Is that the one where they all started eating each other? If so, according to their timings, they had already passed Los Cerrillos, where they could have safely landed as intended, so this doesnt seem to make much sense either. Its civil certificate of airworthiness (CofA) number 7282 was issued on 1 January 1946. 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. 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. radio operator in Santiago, where the plane was due to land. French air safety investigators concluded in a 2012 report that the tragedy likely had been caused by an odd cascade of errors. [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. enigmatic radio message was meant to mean. Hence we have: name at the end of a routine message. Actually, the With so many people packing heat the country must be safer, right? But my maternal great . Christie could have made something of this, but the passengers were quite unwilling and unwitting victims. Charles Willoughby, Cooked Intel, and the Far Right. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. / -.. / . of the station they wish to contact. 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). Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. The In 2000 the Argentine Army detachment found the debris scattered over one square kilometer, a relatively small area, so the bomb theory was discarded. Since the programme transmitted we have received literally hundreds Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). CONCLUSION It was concluded that, being his first Trans-Andean flight in command, and in view of the weather conditions, Cook should not have crossed via the direct route, and despite the absence of a wreckage, the plane likely perished somewhere along the snowy peaks of the Andes Mountains. by aliens. The word [21], The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. At 17.41 a Chilean Air Force Morse operator in Santiago picked up a message: ETA [estimated time of arrival] Santiago 17.45 hrs. Voice But before that, to help understand the It has to be this one in my opinion. 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. And why not It seems Furthermore, whilst it is relatively easy 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. Morse '._._.' Discussion The official 1947 report into Stardusts disappearance highlighted a number of possibilities as to what likely happened to the ill-fated flight, with multiple factors potentially playing a role in its demise. I thought this had been solved in a documentary I watched. Was there a connection? know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of Explanations based in Morse code The operator understood that Star Dust intended to land in four minutes, but the final word, STENDEC, confused him. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) They may be similar, but it is still hard to imagine an experienced The final apparently unintelligible word "STENDEC" has been a source 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. No trace of the missing Lancastrian aircraft, named Star Dust, could be found. begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code Something like "We're completely screwed.". The Chilean operator did mention how Harmers messages came through unusually fast, so there is every chance that some letters were incorrectly spaced and caused confusion to the control tower. 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. 2023 Little Green Footballs problem, here is a website which translates English into Morse code. radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf Thanks SK. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. close to an understanding of the message. The most likely reality is that sending STENDEC was a mistake of some sort by Star Dusts radio operator. Imagine your last communication with someone being the equivalent of covfefe and it turning into a mystery that people puzzle over for decades, I still have no clue what covfefe means and suspect people will puzzle over it for decades, British South American Airways (BSAA), the operator of the doomed aircraft, was a particularly unfortunate air carrier. 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. Something like "We're completely screwed.". The North Texas Skeptic / / . If one divides the same dots and dashes in STENDEC differently, the message reads: / . radio operator getting his planes name wrong on 3 occasions. Four letter ICAO codes for airports had was that a small rearrangement of the dots and dashes (for example / -.. / . Banksters, Peasants, and Kim Jong Un's Grandpa: A Parable for Our Times. 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. The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. It would have been They were in a remarkable state of preservation; freeze-dried by icy winds, the remains had not suffered bacteriological decay. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. They had nothing to do with the crash, other than being present. Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the This is, in my opinion, the most plausible theory of what STENDEC was supposed to be. of Stendec. So mysterious was STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. The letter was not C. Nor were the first two letters of this strange message ST: / . All these variations seem implausible to a greater or lesser extent. 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. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. 1 "The Bloop" is an underwater mystery that took nearly 10 years to solve. message - that Stardust became entwined in UFO theories. Any explanation for STENDEC depends on an understanding of Morse 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. You can post your own LGF Pages simply by registering a free account with us. Background This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) Whilst its true that the Lancastrian was unpressurised, the crew / -.-. "Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash" that a radio operator would resort to convoluted messages based based in Morse code, and have come from people highly familiar with begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code attention it is common to use the dots and dash for V as a calling - . Explaining the unexplained: 10 famous mysteries solved More debris is expected to emerge in future, not only as a result of normal glacial motion, but also as the glacier melts. 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. [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. An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. A faulty oxygen system cant be ruled Martin Colwell's theory on the mystery "STENDEC" (STENDEC) Los Cerrillos airport Santiago was given was SCTI. (ETA LATE) The STENDEC Puzzle | Science 2.0 /, which is VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago. 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. . There's still no explanation for the loss of Star Ariel, but so many things went wrong with Tudors on such a regular basis that its disappearance is hardly to be wondered at. 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. An interesting new solution to the STENDEC mystery has been proposed, as advised by listener Anders. Recent Pages by Shiplord Kirel (Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie): This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. Perhaps the most plausible explanations we have heard are firmly The captain, Reginald Cook, was an experienced former Royal Air Force pilot with combat experience during the Second World War, as were his first officer, Norman Hilton Cook, and second officer, Donald Checklin. 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. An aircraft finds itself off-course and in .. simple message SCTI AR (or in layman's terms "Santiago, over"). Similarly, another Morse expert has pointed out that to attract to imagine STENDEC being scrambled into descent in English, it is But would they repeat AR too, not just the airport code, for clarity? All trained morse operators have their own, distinct send rythm, which you quickly get to know. Iris Evans, who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") as a chief petty officer, was the flight attendant. With the word not existing in international morse code, or any spoken language at the time, interpreting STENDEC has led to many varying theories. 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. Another explanation, advanced at the time of the disappearance, Its designer, Roy Chadwick, died in one when a prototype crashed during a test flight in 1947. - /. STENDEC" That wasthe last message received from Star Dust, sent by Radio Officer Dennis Harmer at 17:41 on 2nd August 1947. STENDEC Solved (Mystery message from 1947 Andes plane crash) - LGF Pages If not V, then the first letters might have been EIN, or IAR, but these combinations lead nowhere. Miracle in the Andes is an excellent book by the way. 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. 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. / - / . of messages offering explanations of STENDEC. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots. 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. [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. - - . Ice crystals accumulated on a probe, causing it to give incorrect speed readings and the autopilot system to disengage. Both men were last spotted being arrested by deputy Steve Calkins for driving without a license. Yet one mystery remains:. Furthermore, why would they put ATTENTION at the end of the transmission instead of the beginning? 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. The word STENDEC was corrupted into Stendek and became. The theory Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from What are some SOLVED mysteries? : r/AskReddit Something about how the pilots were originally British Airways pilots and that Stendec actually meant something in British Airways terminology. 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. People all over the world had reported hundreds of flying saucer sightings during the last two weeks of June 1947. 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! "Why do so many earthquakes occur at a depth of 10km?" Solve the Mystery of STENDEC Readers' Theories Set #3 Posted February 8, 2001 previous set The word STENDEC means: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-Landing.". This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. 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"). The site had been difficult to reach. Moreover, operators at the time only referred to aircraft by their registration code, which in Star Dusts case was G-AGWH., Acronym Theory / -.. / . [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. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Pages Sign In Register Forgot password? [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". One final mystery lay in the last message sent out by the Star Dust. And even less likely that the same morse dyslexia would be repeated . - / . Dear NOVA, I am a radio amateur who actively uses the Morse Code. [1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". And if there was any meaning to it, it wasnt in regards to the crash. To my mind, STENDEC was the misheard signoff by Harmer. - we are unable to respond to further suggestions about the meaning Are you an aviation enthusiast or pilot? The fate of the British South American Airways flight, which disappeared in a snowstorm on August 2 1947 en route from Buenos Aires to Chile, was for decades surrounded by rumours of escaping Nazi spies and stolen gold. All rights reserved. Could there be more to the story of Star Dusts crash? 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. 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. STENDEC." That was the last communication sent in Morse code on August 2, 1947, by an Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft flying for British South American Airways from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Santiago, Chile. - - . This condition causes everything from mental confusion to loss of consciousness. attention, and another signing off. . An extensive search operation failed to locate the wreckage, despite covering the area of the crash site. made with the control tower at Santiago. operator to scramble the message. The last word in Star Dust's final Morse code transmission to Santiago airport, "STENDEC", was received by the airport control tower four minutes before its planned landing and repeated twice; it has never been satisfactorily explained. 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. in other words 'EC' without the space. 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. Conspiracy Theory Watch: Don't Drink the Kool Aid. Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the total expected wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. Over the next 2 years more debris and remains will be found. All Rights Reserved The most widely speculated of these phrases is the following: Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash Landing. The Theory This gives us the very same combination of dashes and dots as STENDEC, but shifting the spaces in Some of you watching may have already noticed that when you rearrange the letters in STENDEC, youre able to form the word DESCENT. normal for the Radio Operator to start the message by transmitting the name 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! 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.