The Disappearance of Star Dust

On 2 August 1947, a British South American Airways (BSAA) Avro Lancastrian airliner, named Star Dust, departed from Buenos Aires Airport, Argentina, at 1.46pm, bound for Santiago, Chile. At 5.41pm, the aircraft sent a message in Morse code to Santiago Airport, predicting an arrival time of 5.45pm. That time came and went without any sign of the BSAA flight. In fact it never arrived. Despite extensive searches by both Argentine and Chilean search teams, and notwithstanding a five day search operation directed by Air Vice Marshall Don Bennett, the head of BSAA, no trace of Star Dust, its passengers or crew, could be found.

The Avro 691 Lancastrian 3, was a relatively new aircraft, having been first registered on 16 January 1946. It was capable of carrying up to 13 passengers, although on the day in question only 6 passengers were on board, which, in addition to the crew of 5, meant there were in total 11 individuals unaccounted for. The flight crew consisted of 3 experienced Royal Air Force pilots, namely; Captain Reginald Cooke, 44, First Officer Norman Hilton Cooke, 39 and Second officer Donald Checklin, 27. Radiotelegraph operator Dennis Harmer, 27 and flight attendant Iris Evans, 26 made up the complement of 5. The passengers consisted of 5 men of Palestinian, Swiss and British nationalities, including a United Kingdom diplomatic courier, and 1 female passenger, Marta Limpert, a German émigré.

To add further to the mystery, the last Morse code messages received from Star Dust were enigmatic, to say the least. The first of three messages was “ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC”. As the radio operator at Santiago airport did not recognise the last word of the transmission, he messaged back seeking clarification. In response, Star Dust’s radiotelegraph operator repeated the word “STENDEC” twice in quick succession, before contact with the aircraft was lost. Despite much speculation and proposed explanations, no definitive interpretation of the word STENDEC has ever been established.

There are, however, theories. The three most plausible being as follows: 1. STENDEC is an anagram of the word DESCENT, which is presumably what the airliner would have been doing at the time of the messages. Hypoxia, is a condition caused by a lack of oxygen, and symptoms include confusion and disorientation. Might the passengers and crew have been suffering from this condition, leading to the radiotelegraph operator inadvertently scrambling part of the message? 2. STENDEC was an obscure abbreviation used by pilots with wartime experience meaning “Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing”. Although given the earlier part of the message, indicating an estimated arrival time at Santiago, this seems improbable. 3. The most compelling possible explanation however, is that in Morse code STENDEC uses the same dot-dash sequence as SCTI AR, but with different spacing between the characters, meaning a simple error in either the sending or receiving of the message could have been to blame. SCTI AR is code and means “Los Cerrillos Santiago, over”. An unabbreviated version of the message would therefore read as follows: “Estimated time of arrival Santiago 17.45 hours, Los Cerrillos Santiago, over”.

So, what became of Star Dust? Absence of evidence led to many theories as to the fate of the aircraft and its occupants. These ranged from accident to sabotage, and even to alien abduction by a UFO. However, in 1998, over 50 years after the disappearance of the airliner, two Argentinian mountaineers came upon a debris field that included the wreckage of a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, in the Tupungato Glacier at a height of 15,000 feet (4,600 m), approximately 50 miles (80km) to the east of Santiago. A subsequent expedition by the Argentine Army in 2000 discovered additional wreckage, that included wheels and a propeller. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, human remains were also recovered from the scene of the disaster. Accident investigators were able to make a number of deductions, based on the remains of the aircraft, that led them in a certain direction. The wreckage was very localised, and the condition of the propeller indicated that the engine had been running at close to cruising speed at the time of impact. Additionally, the condition of the wheels was very good, with one of the tyres being still inflated, indicating that the undercarriage was retracted at the time of the crash. All this pointed to a controlled flight into terrain, meaning it flew straight into the ground, as opposed to breaking up mid-air, or attempting a crash-landing.

But if this is true, what caused an experienced flight crew to do such a thing. The answer, it seems, lay in a combination of environmental factors. In order to reach Santiago, Star Dust had to cross over the Andes mountain range at a height of 24,000 feet (7,300 m), which necessitated the aircraft flying through the high altitude winds of the jet stream. In 1947 the effect of the jet stream was not fully appreciated, and on this occasion the airliner would have encountered a significant headwind, considerably reducing it’s groundspeed, a factor of which the pilots were probably unaware. If we then add to the mix the heavy cloud cover through which the aircraft was flying, the crew would have had no visual points of reference with which to be able to make a judgement as to their precise location relative to the ground. They were essentially flying blind.

By failing to factor in the drag caused by the headwind of the jet stream, the pilots would likely have assumed a faster groundspeed, and probably calculated that they had successfully crossed over the Andes mountains. Without ground vision due to the cloud cover, they seemingly did not realise that they were still flying over the mountain range and as a consequence, in all likelihood, erroneously began their descent for Santiago too soon, flying headfirst into the side of Mount Tupungato, possibly without ever realising their mistake.

In all probability, Star Dust flew into a near vertical snow field close to the top of the glacier. The resulting avalanche would have completely buried the wreckage within moments, and concealed it from the contemporaneous search parties. In the ensuing years, the debris became incorporated into the glacier itself, with fragments gradually emerging farther down the mountain decades later, as a result of a combination of glacier movement and melting ice caused by climate change.

The human remains recovered were identified through DNA sampling. The remains of Captain Reginald Cooke finally returned home to Melbourne in Derbyshire, England, 58 years after he left for work for the last time. He was laid to rest in his home town in 2005.

Sources:

https://theguardian.com

https://wikipedia.org/

https://dailymail.co.uk