. [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". STENDEC. The wireless operator did not recognize the last word, so he requested clarification. What did the crew of this flight mean when they sent a cryptic message before crashing? As for the Avro Tudor, its safety record was deplorable even at the time. 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. Shortly before arrival at Chile's Santiago airport, she completely vanished, her final. Whilst a reasonable theory on the surface, its unfortunately also quite reasonable to discredit. STENDEC. It would be the last anyone ever heard from Star Dust. [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. "[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. When you try to send too quickly that rythm disappears. up sign. message from Star Dust - "E.T.A. . For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. I remember him in his RAF uniform during the war. radio operator in Santiago, where the plane was due to land. Lancasters had four Rolls Royce Merlin engines, the front-line combat engine that powered the latest Spitfire and Mustang fighters. Dear NOVA, I am a radio amateur who actively uses the Morse Code. Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. some similarities both in Morse code and English /- /.-/ .-./ -../ ..-/ / - (Stardust) Again, this is the same as ST, only with different spacing.- (V) 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. 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. In either case, they attempted to contact what they thought was the nearest airport, Valparaiso, not Santiago. 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. In Britain, the news led to a hunt for surviving relatives. British Overseas Airways G-AGLX (the registration number) went down on March 23, 1946, and British Overseas Airways G-AGMF crashed on August 20. As only one young woman was on board, it was assumed to have been that of Iris Moreen Evans, a 26-year-old from the Rhondda valley. Back to 'Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared' programme page. After the third time, communications ceased, and the aircraft disappeared, never reaching its final destination. out very fast. 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. 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. The word simply has no meaning in any language, not even in Morse code. Firstly, despite it being easy to rearrange STENDEC quickly in English text, doing the same in morse code is much more complex and highly implausible due to the nature of the language. The Chilean operator remarks that Harmer sends the final transmission very quickly.A rule of morse operation is that you don't send faster than the receiving operator can decipher.It appears Harmer did send too quickly, even while repeating. 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. Using the
It would be like ending a story with once upon a time., Conclusion That was
by aliens. . The crew probably did not panic, but they were concerned about the lack of visibility and landmarks. 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. 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. amusing messages based on using STENDEC as a series of initials: / -. that Morse transmissions were closing down. That is the official ruling of an Oklahoma court. Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from All these variations seem implausible to a greater or lesser extent. 1 Dec. 2010, Volume 24, Number 12: 1-5. 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. "Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash" Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. The mystery of the word STENDEC took its place among the great unsolved cases so beloved in the lore of urban legendry. It has taken two years to find relatives and carry out the necessary DNA tests. Morse allows a maximum of four dots and dashes in any letter, narrowing the possibility for mistakes. The unit had to finish quickly. / - /. method of signalling a late arrival amongst RAF radio operators.. / - / .- / .-.. / .- / - / . The message was repeated-STENDEC, then transmitted a third time. Imaginative souls speculated that aliens had snatched the large Lancastrian along with its passengers and crew. aircraft were usually referred to by their registration (in Stardusts 2023 Madavor Media, LLC. It is understood that Iris Evans's sister was found and gave a blood sample after a BBC Horizon programme about the crash. Seems very unlikely. 2023 Little Green Footballs this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled"). begun to be used four months earlier in April 1947 and the four-letter code
[1][2], The last Morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". Morse transmissions prior to picking up voice communication. Perhaps STENDEC was an abbreviation for a much longer message, an acronym sent in a hurry due to being in a crunch for time. / -.. / . '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. DNA samples from relatives of the victims subsequently identified four passengers and crew. of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic STENDEC - Solved?! The Army unit also discovered that the wheels on the plane were in an upward position, so the crew had not attempted an emergency landing. 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. ETA LATE sounds like a reasonable message a plane would communicate to a control tower, although in the context of the whole sentence, it contradicts the first part completely, as they were only four minutes away from their destination. 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. Although the larger mystery was finally solved, many still wonder how experienced pilots (there were three on board) lost control of the aircraft in a seemingly manageable situation. Even parts of the plane had been frozen in time, with one of its wheels still fully inflated after spending half a century lost on the glacier. [11], In 2000, an Argentine Army expedition found additional wreckageincluding a propeller and wheels (one of which had an intact and inflated tyre)and noted that the wreckage was well localised, a fact which pointed to a head-on impact with the ground, and which also ruled out a mid-air explosion. 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. All Rights Reserved made with the control tower at Santiago. know for certain, but I believe this is by far the most likely meaning of
/ . Really neat, I hadn't heard of this before. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing. Adding to the mystery, two Avro 691 Lancastrian aircraft had crashed during the previous seventeen months. Anagram Theory This made for interesting reading and a welcome diversion from the usual flood of depressing news. / -. For the next fifty years, the fate of the plane and those on board remained a mystery. the sign off for a Morse code message is AR. Therefore a standard signoff would be sent as the
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. name at the end of a routine message. of the above, please follow the link to Martin Colwell's website here -
After an exhausting search, no trace of the aircraft was found. that final message from the ill-fated Lancastrian. 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.