This video was made possible by Curiosity Stream.
Watch unlimited documentaries for free for a month at CuriosityStream.com/HAI.
In 2002, a South African businessman by the name of Keith Irwin came to Miami to buy,
surprisingly, not drugs.
You see, he and his partners had secured a contract to deliver fuel to diamond mines
in Angola.
Small problem—there was a civil war going on.
Now, wars and ground-based fuel supply chains go together like Taco Bell and the human digestive
system—explosively.
Therefore, they would deliver fuel by plane and that’s what Irwin came to Miami to buy.
He had found a 25 year-old Boeing 727 that had recently been retired from service with
American Airlines.
The plane was in good condition but had been around for about as long as Angola had even
been a country so the agreed purchase price was a reasonable $1 million with $125,000
paid upfront as a down payment and the rest due within 30 days because they knew they
would need a good foreshadowing moment.
Irwin and the crew he hired to operate it then flew the plane to Luanda—Angola’s
capital.
The company that had hired Irwin was supposed to pay him $220,000 once the plane arrived
in the country but instead, they decided to not—which was a bummer.
The other totally unpredictable bummer was that apparently the accommodations and quality
of life in the middle of the war zone were less than stellar.
Given that, two of the airplane’s hired crew turned right back around and returned
to the US.
You would have thought that American pilots, given that they have to spend lots of time
in places like Newark, would be used to war zone conditions.
Since the first client seemed to not really exist anymore, Irwin found a new one and they
got to flying.
Through time, though, each crew member experienced their own set of terrifying and traumatizing
events that made them each eventually decide to return back to the US and so the plane
ended up being operated by an all Angolan crew and Irwin was left pretty much alone.
Irwin still owed a lot of money on the plane and eventually picked up a tail.
Some guy would follow him around constantly.
Irwin apparently believed that this tail worked for one of his partners.
Growing increasingly paranoid, Irwin would blockade his hotel room door during the night
by wedging a chair under the handle.
Then, one night, someone, nobody really knows who, bribed the hotel security guard, got
a room key, and tried to get into Irwin’s room.
He yelled and scared them off, but the next morning, he packed his bags and got out of
Angola for good.
With that, the plane was left all alone in Angola.
The original owner from Miami, who had never been paid the full balance by Irwin, hired
someone named Ben Padilla to go to Luanda and repossess the plane.
The problem, though, was that, by the time Padilla got to Luanda, the 727 had been sitting
around for a while with nobody responsible for it—racking up parking fees, fines, and
getting into a progressively more dysfunctional state.
It would take some time to get it back to working order so Padilla hired a local mechanic
crew to fix it up and, after some months of work, it was almost ready to be flown down
to Johannesburg to a new client.
On May 23, 2003, though, the aircraft was powered on, taxied to the runway without contacting
air traffic control, and took off.
There were no plans for the plane to take off then, it never talked to air traffic control,
best anyone could tell it was only Padilla and a mechanic, who was not a pilot, onboard
and the 727 typically needs three trained aircrew to fly.
Everyone was well and truly baffled.
As this was only two years after 9/11, the US was understandably concerned about a large
plane being completely unaccounted for so they immediately began searching for it.
The plane had enough to fuel to fly 1,500 miles or 2,400 kilometers meaning it could
have made it anywhere here—it was a large search radius.
Now, with airplanes, unless we’re talking about Xenu’s Space Plane, there are really
only two choices—they either land or they crash.
Now, option one’s problem is that the plane was never found at any known airport.
That seems to support option two’s plausibility but the thing is, in the 16 years since its
disappearance, not a shred of wreckage of the 727 has ever been found, and that would
be quite rare.
To date, only one plane larger than this 727 has truly disappeared without a trace.
This isn’t like loosing a prime minister—planes are large and its just hard for them to truly
disappear.
Some have suggested that it was stolen in order to run drugs for cartels or something
like that, but that wouldn’t explain why the plane still hasn’t been seen.
Some others have suggested that this was a case of insurance fraud, but that seems unlikely
given that the owner had just spend a considerable amount of money fixing up the plane and paying
off fines.
It wouldn’t make sense for them to go and destroy it then for the insurance money.
Also, since there has never been any proof that the plane crashed or was stolen, the
owner has never actually received any insurance money.
The location or fate of this plane is just a true and complete mystery.
Despite extensive efforts by the FBI, the US state department, and plenty of investigative
journalists, not a single piece of evidence supporting any explanation for the 727’s
disappearance has ever been found.
It’s like it never existed.
The explanation that most people seem to most accept at this point is that someone was on
board when Padilla and the mechanic boarded the plane on that fateful night and held them
at gunpoint—forcing them to take off in order to steal the plane.
Then, they presumably crashed—somehow, improbably, without a trace.
Now, one thing that I find interesting about these fiery death tubes is that apparently,
95.7% of people inside them survive when they crash.
This might surprise you and you’d probably ask, “how,” and I’d answer, “Curiosity
Stream.”
As in, go check out this documentary on Curiosity Stream that explains the science behind how
people survive plane crashes.
It’s just one of over 2,400 documentaries that you can watch on CuriosityStream on all
these different platforms for just $2.99 per month.
Their documentaries span every genre and are available worldwide from Paraguay to Peru—the
long way around, I guess.
If you sign up at curiositystream.com/hai, though, you’ll get your first 31 days completely
for free.