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1947 BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust accident

Coordinates: 33°22′15″S 69°45′40″W / 33.37083°S 69.76111°W / -33.37083; -69.76111
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STENDEC redirects here. For the band, see Stendec (band). For the UFO magazine, see Stendek (magazine). For the American musician, see Stendek (musician).
BSAA Star Dust crash
BSAA Lancastrian 3 Star Dust.
Accident
Date2 August 1947
SummaryControlled flight into terrain due to severe weather conditions[1]
SiteTupungato Mountain, Argentina
Aircraft typeAvro Lancastrian
OperatorBritish South American Airways
RegistrationG-AGWH
Flight originMorón Airport and Air Base (MOR/SADM),[2] Buenos Aires, Argentina
DestinationLos Cerrillos Airport (ULC/SCTI),[3] Santiago, Chile
Passengers6
Crew5
Fatalities11 (all)
Survivors0

Star Dust (registration G-AGWH) was a British South American Airways (BSAA) Avro Lancastrian airliner which disappeared in mysterious circumstances on 2 August 1947 during a flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Santiago, Chile. A comprehensive search of a wide area (including what is now known to have been the crash site) discovered no wreckage, and the true fate of the aircraft and its passengers and crew remained a mystery for over fifty years. Speculation about the cause and nature of the disappearance of Star Dust included theories of international intrigue, intercorporate sabotage, or abduction by aliens.

In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage from the missing aircraft began to emerge from glacial ice in the Andes mountains near Santiago. It is now assumed that the crew became confused as to their exact location whilst flying at high altitudes through the (then poorly understood) jet stream. Mistakenly believing that they had already cleared the mountain tops before starting their descent, when in fact they were still behind cloud-covered peaks, Star Dust slammed into Mount Tupungato, killing all aboard and burying the wreckage in snow and ice.

A mystery regarding Star Dust that remains unsolved to this day relates to the flight's final Morse Code transmission to the Santiago airport, received four minutes prior to its planned landing. The last word of the transmission—heard by the airport control tower's radio operator as "STENDEC"—has never been satisfactorily explained, despite speculation from numerous aviation and radio experts and members of the public.

Background

Star Dust carried six passengers and a crew of five on its final flight. The captain, Reginald Cook, was an experienced Royal Air Force pilot with combat experience during World War II—as were his first officer, Norman Hilton-Cook, and second officer, Donald Cheklin. Reginald Cook had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). The radio operator, Dennis Harmer, also had a record of wartime as well as civilian service. The crew also included Iris Evans, a flight attendant or "Stargirl", who had previously served in the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens").[4]

The passengers were Casis Said Atalah, a Palestinian returning home to Chile from a visit to his dying mother; Jack Gooderham and Harald Pagh, businessmen; Peter Young, an agent for the British tyre manufacturer Dunlop; Paul Simpson, a British civil servant; and Marta Limpert, a Chilean resident of German origin who had been stranded in Germany during the war along with her husband. Atalah is said to have had a diamond with him (stitched into the lining of his suit), Limpert was bringing her dead husband's ashes with her, and Simpson was functioning as a King's Messenger with diplomatic documents destined for the British embassy in Santiago.[5]

Star Dust's last flight was the final leg of BSAA Flight CS59, which had started in London on an Avro York named Star Mist on 29 July 1947, landing in Buenos Aires on 1 August.[6] Marta Limpert was the only one of the six passengers 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.[8]

Disappearance

The flight left Buenos Aires at 1.46 PM on 2 August[9] and 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.[10] However, Star Dust never arrived, no more radio transmissions were received by the airport, and intensive efforts by both Chilean and Argentinian search teams, as well as by other BSAA pilots, failed to uncover any trace of the aircraft or of the people on board.[3]

A report by an amateur radio operator who claimed to have received a faint SOS signal from Star Dust initially raised hopes that there might have been survivors,[3] but all subsequent attempts over the years to find the vanished flight failed. In the absence of any hard evidence, numerous theories arose—including rumours of sabotage (compounded by the later disappearance of two other aircraft also belonging to British South American Airways)[5]; speculation that the flight might have been blown up in order to destroy diplomatic documents being carried by passenger Paul Simpson;[5] or even the suggestion that Star Dust might have been taken or destroyed by a UFO (an idea fuelled by unresolved questions about the flight's final Morse code message).[10]

Discovery of wreckage and reconstruction of the crash

In 1998, two Argentinian mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato in the Andes—about 60 mi (97 km) west-southwest of Mendoza, Argentina, and about 50 mi (80 km) east of Santiago—found the wreckage of a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, along with twisted pieces of metal and shreds of clothing, in a glacier at an elevation of 15,000 ft (4,600 m).[3]. In 2000, an Argentinian army expedition found additional wreckage—including 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.[11] Human remains were also recovered, including three torsos, a foot in an ankle boot and a manicured hand. By 2002, the bodies of five of the eight British victims had been identified through DNA testing.[12]

A recovered propeller showed that the engine had been running at near-cruising speed at the time of the impact. Additionally, the condition of the wheels proved that the undercarriage was still retracted, suggesting controlled flight into terrain rather than an attempted emergency landing.[13] During the final portion of Star Dust's flight, heavy clouds would have made the ground invisible. It has therefore been suggested that, in the absence of visual sightings of the ground due to the clouds, a large navigational error could have been made as the aircraft flew through the jet stream—a phenomenon not well understood in 1947, in which high-altitude winds can blow at high speed in directions different from those of winds observed at ground level.[14] If the airliner, which had to cross the Andes mountain range at 24,000 ft (7,300 m), had entered the jet-stream zone (which in this area normally blows from the west and south-west), this would have significantly decreased the aircraft's ground speed. Mistakenly assuming their ground speed to be faster than it really was, the crew may have deduced that they had already safely crossed the Andes, and so commenced their descent to Santiago, whereas in fact they were still a considerable distance to the east-north-east and were approaching the cloud-shrouded Tupungato Glacier at high speed.[5] Some BSAA pilots, however, have expressed scepticism at this theory; convinced that Cook would not have started his descent without a positive indication that he had crossed the mountains, they have suggested that strong winds may have brought down the craft in some other way.[15]

A similar set of events to those that doomed Star Dust also caused the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972 (the crash made famous in the film Alive), though there were survivors from that crash because it involved a glancing blow to a mountainside rather than a head-on collision.[16]

The Andes above modern-day Santiago.

Star Dust is likely to have flown into a nearly vertical snow field near the top of the glacier, causing an avalanche that buried the wreckage within seconds and concealed it from searchers. As the compressed snow turned to ice, the wreckage would have been incorporated into the body of the glacier, with fragments emerging many years later and much farther down the mountain. Between 1998 and 2000, about ten per cent of the wreckage emerged from the glacier, prompting several re-examinations of the accident. More debris is expected to emerge in future, not only as a result of normal glacial motion, but also as the glacier melts.[5]

A 2000 Argentine air force investigation cleared Captain 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".[1]

STENDEC

The word STENDEC was reported by the radio operator at Santiago airport as the last word of a "loud and clear" Morse code message, sent "very fast" at 5.41 PM. "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC" was the last of a series of messages transmitted by Star Dust during its flight, reporting its position, altitude, and a revised estimated time of arrival in Santiago of 5.45 PM. The airport radio operator claimed to have requested and received two confirmations of the unfamiliar word STENDEC before contact was lost. This word has still not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation—including suggestions (made before the wreckage was finally discovered) that the aircraft and those aboard might have been the victims of a UFO encounter.[10]

One string of theories suggests that the letters in STENDEC were meant to form an acronym, such as "Starting En-Route Descent" or "Severe Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Emergency Crash-Landing", but no reliable documentation has been found to indicate that these acronyms were in use, nor that radio operators used their own non-standard acronyms. Other hypotheses center around a possible mishearing of the Morse code by the Santiago operator. It has been suggested, for example, that STENDEC might actually have been STR DEC ("Starting Descent"), since, in Morse Code, EN is · —· and R is ·—·. It has also been observed that STENDEC is an anagram of DESCENT. None of the various hypotheses have been, or presumably can ever be, either proved or ruled out.[17]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b "Pilot finally cleared over mystery of 1947 mountain plane disaster". The Birmingham Post. 8 July 2000. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  2. ^ Rayner (2002), p. 112
  3. ^ a b c d "Stardust Lost in the Andes". Vanishings!. 27 September 2003. History International. {{cite episode}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  4. ^ "Lost plane found in Andes". BBC News. 26 January 2000. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  5. ^ a b c d e "Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared". BBC. 2 November 2000. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  6. ^ Rayner (2002), pp. 119–122.
  7. ^ Rayner (2002), p. 119.
  8. ^ "Vanished: 1947 Official Accident Report". PBS. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  9. ^ Rayner (2002), p. 124.
  10. ^ a b c "'STENDEC' – Stardust's final mysterious message". BBC. 2 November 2000. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  11. ^ Rayner (2002), p. 212.
  12. ^ "DNA clues reveal 55-year old secrets behind crash of the Star Dust". The Guardian. 6 September 2002. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  13. ^ Rayner (2002), p. 213.
  14. ^ Rayner (2002), p. 214.
  15. ^ Rayner (2002), pp. 215–216.
  16. ^ "I Am Alive: The Crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571". History.com. Retrieved 18 August 2011.
  17. ^ "Solve the Mystery of STENDEC: Readers' Theories". PBS. 31 January 2001. Retrieved 18 August 2011.

References

Rayner, Jay (2002). Star Dust Falling: The Story of the Plane that Vanished. Doubleday. ISBN 038560226X.

External links

33°22′15″S 69°45′40″W / 33.37083°S 69.76111°W / -33.37083; -69.76111

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