Think about the last time you were on an airplane.
There was probably some turbulence, this always seems to happen just as the flight attendants
start to distribute drinks.
Turbulence is not uncommon during flights, what is uncommon is when planes mysteriously
vanish.
We are going to look at some of the most mysterious aircraft disappearances that have ever happened.
Each mystery will be more puzzling than the last, and after this video you’ll have to
remind yourself that flying is still one of the safest ways to travel.
We are going to follow these mysterious aircraft disappearances chronologically.
As we proceed through history you might find that there are connections between seemingly
unrelated disappearances.
Also, as we work forward in time technology and communications equipment got better and
better, which logically should have made aircraft disappearances less likely.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case, you may be surprised what mysteries
still lurk out there in the skies.
In 1944 the famous big band leader Glenn Miller set out from London to Paris to bring music
and entertainment to the Allied Troops fighting agasint Nazi Germany.
His new swing genre provided an escape from the horrors of the war.
It was a cold December day and fog covered the tarmac.
The takeoff from London went routinely and without a hitch.
The aircraft rose to cruising altitude.
The flight over the English Channel should have been a relatively short one.
But after hours of waiting for Glenn Miller’s flight to land, the airfield in Paris became
more and more worried.
The weather was not ideal, but it was no worse than most days flying over the English Channel.
There was only one thing the airbase in France could do; they declared the flight missing,
and immediately sent out a rescue mission to search for the remains of the plane or
any survivors.
However, no trace of Miller or the Noorduyn UC-64A aircraft he was on was found.
This led to speculation among the general public.
Tensions during the war were incredibly high and mistakes were made.
Many people at the time believed that Glenn Miller’s plane had been accidentally bombed
by an allied aircraft that was dropping its payload from an aborted mission, sending the
music celebrity crashing into the English Channel.
No trace of the plane or Glenn Miller was ever found.
The year following the tragedy of Glenn Miller’s disappearance one of the most infamous flight
mysteries occurred.
This was an event that inspired legends, conspiracy theories, and avoidance of a certain part
of the Atlantic Ocean even to this day.
Flight 19 took off from Ft.
Lauderdale, Florida to run a routine bombing practice mission off the coast in the Atlantic.
Unfortunately for these aircraft, they were flying directly into the Bermuda Triangle.
The day was December 5th, the weather conditions were recorded as being “average.”
The first group of five General Motors Eastern Aircraft Division TBM Avenger torpedo bombers
took off and headed for their practice destination.
As they flew deeper into the Bermuda Triangle, the compasses onboard their aircrafts began
to malfunction.
The needles spun uncontrollably in circles as they flew.
This was not the first time pilots had encountered this phenomenon in the area.
There were also parts of the China Sea where flight compasesses acted in this peculiar
way.
But what happened next shocked people around the world.
Suddenly all five of the planes lost communication with the airbase.
The men at the ground station could still pick up communications between the pilots,
but they were not able to send communications from the airfield to the planes.
The pilots began to panic.
Over the comms it became clear that they were disoriented and didn’t know which way to
proceed.
The bombers were quickly running out of fuel and when they dropped below 10 gallons in
their reserves, the pilots decided to make an emergency landing in the sea.
A rescue mission was immediately launched by the Coast Guard and Navy.
It covered over 700,000 square kilometers and lasted five days.
During this rescue mission a sixth plane mysteriously vanished.
The aircraft was a Martin PBM Mariner with a crew of 13.
It took off from a Naval Air Station at Banana River to search for Flight 19, but never returned
from its mission.
The only clue as to what happened to the Mariner and its crew was from an ocean liner that
reported seeing a fireball in the sky around the same time that the Martin PBM Mariner
was searching for the lost planes in the Bermuda Triangle.
The ocean liner crew reported watching the fireball fall from the sky and being extinguished
as it entered the ocean.
All six planes and every crew member was lost to the Bermuda Triangle.
No wreckage or evidence was ever recovered from Flight 19.
To this day the Bermuda Triangle still holds mysteries that have yet to be explained.
Although there are no shortage of Bermuda Triangle enigmas, something even stranger
occurred above the Andes mountains in 1947.
The only clue to what really happened was a coded message that was sent from the aircraft
that disappeared.
All the message said was: STENDEC.
On August 2, 1947 a British South American Airways Avro Lancastrian airliner called the
Star Dust left Buenos Aires, Argentina headed for Santiago, Chile.
The flight seemed to be going according to plan, until a Chilean Air Force operator received
a message from the Star Dust.
All the message said was STENDEC.
Confused, the operator reported it to his superior.
The military thought nothing of it until it was discovered that the Star Dust had never
reached its destination.
It had vanished without a trace.
When news of the missing airliner reached the public, they tried to make sense of the
strange message.
Some thought it was a code that indicated the airplane was being abducted by aliens.
Others put forth the theory that it was a warning that Nazi spies were onboard and trying
to commondeer the plane.
After an investigation it was discovered that inclimate weather in the region most likely
played a role in the disappearance of the Star Dust.
Investigators made sense of the STENDEC message by referring to a World War II code, meaning:
“Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing.”
Instead of sending all of the words via morse code, the abbreviation would have been sent
because it was much faster.
Another meaning of the mysterious code may have been the word DESCENT mistyped due to
the pilots running out of time before the plane crashed, or from the confusion caused
by hypoxia due to lack of oxygen.
The true meaning of the coded message may never be uncovered, but something else was.
Fifty years after the mysterious disappearance, the Star Dust emerged from the glacial ice
of the Andes mountains.
When the plane crashed it instantly caused an avalanche, which buried the aircraft under
feet of snow.
We now know where the Star Dust ended up, but we may never know what actually caused
the plane to crash.
Or the true meaning of STENDEC, sent moments before the plane was buried for nearly half
a century.
The next two aircraft disappearances may have had a devious connection.
We will let you be the judge of what really happened to the Star Tiger and the Star Ariel.
On January 30, 1948 the British South American Airways Avro Tudor IV plane named Star Tiger
left the archipelago islands of the Azores.
It was here that the plane was being refueled for its final stretch from London to Bermuda.
Before the plane took off the mechanics had been investigating a problem with the heater
on the plane.
They could not fix the problem, but insisted the plane could still make the journey.
The Star Tiger would need to fly at a low altitude to maintain a reasonable temperature
in the cabin and cockpit.
It was decided that the Star Tiger was to maintain an altitude of 2,000 feet, which
left very little room for error if something went wrong.
In order to make sure the Star Tiger did not run into any inclement weather while flying
at such a low altitude, an Avro Lancastrian flew in front of it to serve as a lookout.
The low altitude also caused the Star Tiger to burn fuel at a much quicker rate due to
the increased drag while flying so low.
The guide plane needed to fly a significant distance ahead to give the Star Tiger enough
time to make any adjustments to their course.
But when the first plane landed, the Star Tiger was nowhere in sight.
After several hours the ground team began to worry.
They sent out a rescue mission to search for the Star Tiger, but no trace of the plane
or the 25 passengers and 6 crew members it carried was found.
The investigators eventually concluded that the low altitude may have caused gusts of
wind to force the Star Tiger into the ocean with no hope of recovery.
Although, there was a strange occurrence that kept repeating itself during the flight.
Every positional report sent by the Star Tiger gave the altitude of the aircraft at 20,000
feet, even though they were supposed to stay at 2,000 feet above sea level.
This may have just been a mistake, even though it happened multiple times.
But if the crew actually believed they were at 20,000 feet, and then went into their final
descent, they would have immediately crashed into the ocean.
Maybe the crew was fatigued after the long flight, or the instruments were misread and
the Star Tiger’s disappearance was due to a miscalculation.
Now things are going to get a little more strange as we examine the next aircraft disappearance.
Almost exactly one year later the British South American Airways Star Ariel aircraft
also mysteriously vanished.
On January 17, 1949 the Star Ariel had a flight plan from Bermuda to Jamaica.
About an hour into the flight, the Star Ariel relayed their location to the ground station
as per routine.
However, shortly after this event, the Star Ariel disappeared completely.
The sudden disappearance of the aircraft was reported, and a rescue party was sent out
after the plane never landed in Jamaica.
The rescue party found no remains or any indication of what happened to the Star Ariel along its
flight path.
They were able to rule out improbable scenarios such as the plane running out of fuel, pilot
error, or inclement weather.
The final report concluded that: “some external cause may have overwhelmed both man and machine.”
This caused a myriad of conspiracy theories to spread around the world.
But none of these theories were more surprising than the one that came from a former employee
of British South American Airways, Don Bennet.
He had been fired in 1948 when he objected to a judicial investigation into what had
happened to the Star Tiger.
When the Star Ariel disappeared Don Bennett claimed that both of the aircrafts had been
sabotaged.
He even indicated that a known “war-registered saboteur” had been spotted near the Star
Tiger just before it had taken off.
Bennett also said that U.K. Prime Minister Clement Attlee ordered that all investigations
and inquiries about the mysterious disappearances of the Star Tiger and Star Ariel be ceased
before they had concluded.
This was seen as a shady move, and may have been because the prime minister was trying
to cover something up.
Perhaps there was a serial saboteur after British South American Airways, or maybe both
of these disappearances had no connection at all, and instead were caused by pilot error
or inclement weather.
Since neither the wreckage of the Star Tiger or Star Ariel has ever been found, we may
never know.
What is worse than an aircraft mysteriously disappearing with passengers and crew on it?
An aircraft mysteriously disappearing with crew and nuclear ordnance on it.
In 1956 a Boeing B-47 Stratojet took off from MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
It was headed to Morocco and carried two nuclear weapon cores on board.
The B-47 was successfully refueled over the Atlantic during flight.
The crew and refueling pilots did not make any indication that there was anything wrong.
The aircraft continued on towards its destination.
As it approached the African coast, the B-47 descended through a thick layer of clouds.
It was after this that all contact was lost with the aircraft carrying the two nuclear
weapon cores.
Unsurprisingly, a frantic search was conducted to locate the remains of the aircraft, crew,
or nuclear devices.
The United States Military declared the crew dead and the aircraft missing in action after
several days of searching.
The nuclear weapons were designated “broken arrows,” as they did not hold any risk of
detonating, or creating an all out nuclear war.
The United States has lost 11 nukes, but the two lost in the mysterious disappearance of
the B-47 Stratojet are by far the most eerie.
We do not know if the aircraft altered its course and landed somewhere else with its
payload, or if the nuclear devices are resting at the bottom of the Atlantic at this very
moment.
Either way, it was one of the most mysterious aircraft disappearances in history.
In each of the aircraft mysteries from this video investigators were left with more questions
than answers.
It would seem that the oceans of this planet may hold more secrets than previously thought.
Out of all of the mysterious aircraft disappearances discussed, only one of the planes has been
found, and that was the only one that occurred over land.
Who knows what answers the depths of the oceans may hold about the missing aircrafts and their
passengers.
Now check out “Malaysian Air Mystery, What We Now Know About Missing Flight MH370.”
Or watch “Did Pan Am Flight 914 Really Land 37 Years Later.”