The "mystery" was already solved! Due to head wind caused by the jet stream, navigator miscalculated the covered distance, pilot started to descend before traversing high mountain peaks. Journey took place in August( winter south of equator) ,Due to "Dark Skies" it was too difficult to distinguish between clouds and snow covered peaks. CFT, The end!
if you replace the first 'E' with an 'A' then you get STAN-DEC which could be an abbreviation for STANDARD DECENT and that the plane flew into the mountain because the pilots thought they had cleared the mountain range.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing"
@@panzerjagertigerporsche The entire message was "ETA Santiago 17.45hrs STENDEC" The patterns of dots and dashes for STENDEC is the same as SCTI AR. The 4 letter code for Santiago's Los Cerrillos airpot is "SCTI" . "AR" means "Acknowledge and repeat" So the message was actually "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45HRS SCTI AR" What threw the airport radio operator at the airport off was the syntax of the message. He would have expected "ETA SCTI 17.45 HRS AR" ( Estimated time of arrival at Santiago's Los Cerrillos Airport 5:45 PM , Acknowledge and repeat.) Instead the planes operator sent. "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS SCTI AR" (Estimated time of arrival at Santiago 5:45 pm, Santiago's Los Cerrilos Airport acknowledge and repeat.) This confused the airports radio operator so he sent back " STENDEC " and the plane operator responded back "SCTI AR" ( remember its the same pattern of dots and dashes) "STENDEC"? "SCTI AR"! After several back and forths between the planes operator and the airport the plane hit the mountain and you had a confused airport radio operator wondering what the Hell "STENDEC" meant.
@@pizzafrenzyman I debunk for a hobby , so I picked up the habit of going into deep detail , because if you just say: "STENDEC is the same dit-dah pattern as STCI AR which is a standard and expected radio message." You get a lot of UFO believers challenging and insulting you so I just dump all the information on them at once. I have to tell them what the entire message was, how easy it is for the radio operator to misinterpret the message and what "SCTI AR" actually means.
Solution to the mystery? Convert STENDEC to International Code: ... /_ /. / _. / _.. / . / _._. Just change the spacing a bit and we get: ... /_._. / _ /.. /._ ._. You can look it up. That spells SCTI AR. SCTI was the old ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) abbreviation for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, which is where they were headed. As an Extra Class radio operator (and Pilot) I encountered such sloppy spacing many, many times. Also, I was required to know that AR meant "end of transmission," and sent and received it at the end of countless messages. The mis-copied message was: ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC. Correcting the spacing and paraphrasing, we get: "Estimated time of Arrival Santiago 17.45 Hours, Los Cerillos Airport Santiago. End of transmission." This is detailed in the Wikipedia listing for the crash. Chris Bart, W8IG
Just because something is repeated, doesn't mean it isn't a mistake. There are many different reasons why someone would repeat an incorrect transmission, such as wrong codes, faulty and uncomfortable equipment, mental fog caused by extreme altitude sickness or low pressure, distractions caused by an emergency situation taking their attention away, someone else manning the communications because the trained person was unable to...
Star Tiger and Star Aerial, two Avro Tudors of the same airline, disappeared without trace in 1948 & 1949 respectively whilst flying to and from Bermuda. Their loss has remained a mystery. Worth a companion vid.
The cabin was unpresurised, the radio operator could well have been suffering mental confusion due to the effects of hypoxia when flying at 20,000 feet. Rearrange the letters of stendec and you get descent, he could have been trying to say they were in the descent phase of the flight.
Very interesting, I live in Jamaica and during WW2 a US navy Kingfisher (squadron VS-60) disappeared just off our south coast during a training mission in !943. It was broad daylight and 2 other planes of it's squadron were in the air and in the area at the time but no one saw it go down. It was never found.
They sent a message at 5:41 PM indicating they would arrive at Santiago at 5:45 PM. 4 minutes. They clearly thought they were farther along on their flightpath (derived from cruising speeds of 220 to 250 knots - they must have believed they were 15 to 18 miles from Santiago) The flightcrew were all WWII veteran RAF aviators (don't think the former RN PO had an active role in the mishap - lack of evidence). Yes, STENDEC was one of many acronyms widely accepted by British and American aviation personnel, naval and merchant marine radio operators indicating Severe Turbulence Encountered Descending (could be a whole video on its own). However, severe turbulence constitutes an emergency and is incongruent with the regular advisory of arrival 4 minutes later...sent twice! But John Ison, in a posting to a PBS NOVA presentation, made a very good theoretical observation that fits perfectly with that routine 5:45 arrival advisory. "I am an experienced code op, both ham radio, military, and commercial. If a single dash is added to the beginning of STENDEC, the result is: BT END AR. BT is a very common Morse code 'break' sequence. It separates one subject from another, the body of a message from the signature, and is very commonly used in place of the period at the end of a sentence in a casual communication. (BT is easier to send than a period AAA.) Harmer would have used it to separate the body of his message from the end as: ETA 17.45 HRS BT END AR (Take a look at a message in the ARRL HANDBOOK 1993, page 37-19.) One item not mentioned is that Harmer was probably using 'break-in' keying. This is where actual key contacts also cause the equipment to go into transmit mode. Especially with older tube-type equipment, it is very common for the first character (in this case, a dash for each of the two successive queries that Harmer responded to) to be 'missed'. This occurs because the equipment requires a brief moment to change from receive to transmit. It occurs at the first key press after being in a receive mode. Typically, that first character is made shorter or does not get transmitted at all. The result would be exactly the letters STENDEC. It's even more possible if the operator (Harmer) was sending "very fast" as reported by the Santiago operator. Missing that dash would also make it more difficult for the Santiago operator who is trying to copy very fast code to intuitively decipher that STENDEC is really just a BT with END and AR, run together." Different picture, right? Routine, "We're arriving in 4 minutes, that's it". While the pilots, believing that they are 15 to 18 miles from Santiago and clear of the mountain range (and attendant volcano) begin their descent for approach. It is true that in 1946 they did not have a good grasp of the jetstream. They were 50 miles from Santiago. The post-crash avalanche theory explains why the aircraft disappeared without a trace - for 50 some years. Meteorological conditions could have easily prevented the second officer from accurately calculating their position, especially if they were in the soup. My only question would be in reference to ground station fly-over beacons. They were in use as early as the mid to late 30s in other mountainous areas of South America, but not there?
Additionally, D Erbe explained the use of these code words... The word STENDEC means: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-Landing." Let me explain. During World War II, Allied convoys crossing the Atlantic would encounter U-boats. Some of the Allied ships came equipped with rocket-launched fighters-P-40s or Spitfires-which were launched to attack any U-boats. These planes could not land back on the ships and so were termed "throwaway" planes. When a pilot ran out of ammo or fuel, he would send a short Morse message, EDAS, meaning "Emergency Ditch at Sea." Allied ships in the area would triangulate on the plane's position, and the nearest Coast Guard or Navy ship would go pick up the pilot, who had ejected" (bailed out) "from his plane. EDAS was an intentional ditch, whereas STENDEC implied an unintentional ditch due to bad weather or for some other reason. It meant essentially "My plane's in trouble, I may have to ditch, so please triangulate my position and be prepared to pick me up." When I saw the word STENDEC on the NOVA program, I remembered seeing that word in a book somewhere. I couldn't find the reference, so I went and asked my father, who is nearly 80 years old and who served in the Merchant Marine during the war. He said that he sat across from the radio operator on his ship and heard the word STENDEC-with the meaning given above-all the time from these convoy-protecting pilots. Maybe the pilot in control of Stardust ran into severe turbulence in the Andes. Perhaps the wings were icing over, affecting lift; possibly an engine was knocked loose from its mounts. In any case, the plane was going down. The radio operator had seconds to convey the plane's emergency situation. Either the radio operator or the pilot, who had flown over 100 missions in the war, knew this word STENDEC and tapped it out-very fast as the Chilean radio operator remembered. I hope this helps to clear up the mystery." Great insight into how the code words were used and kind of explains why many people were not that familiar with them. However, I still think John Ison is onto something in the morse code sequence itself, related to hastily executed coding/decoding. Hey, it was 1946. People were doing the best they could with the technology at hand.
There have been more than a few modern aircraft that have happily flown straight into mountains due to pilot or instrument error, I'm surprised it didn't happen more often in the early days of commercial aviation.
A B-17 flew into a Mountain 🏔️ in Oxford County Maine in 1944. My Grandfather was a Scoutmaster who helped to recover the bodies with his Scout Troop. An Antique Heirloom Ring was aboard the plane,and was never found. Bears and Coyotes ate parts of the bodies before Recovery.
A lot of shots of the high-wing "York" transport which had a different fuselage to the "Lancastrian": there are also others of "Lancaster" bombers in camouflage.
Read the post above... what they were sending was SCTI AR. SCTI was the old four letter code for Santiago, and AR is the radio code in Morse for "end of transmission." The radio operator on the aircraft just screwed up the spacing. S ... T _ E . N _. D _.. E . C _._. S ... C _._. T _ I .. AR ._._. The dits & dahs all work out the same. When someone's sending on a straight key, especially if they're on an aircraft which might be going through turbulence, then it's not out of the question that the spacing might get messed up.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing"
My father was in the US Foreign Service in the 1960s and we lived in Santiago for a number of years. During that time, there was at least one US military flight (heading to Panama) piloted by an experienced crew that flew almost directly into a mountainside in an accident attributed to low visibility & high turbulence. (With this particular accident, at least two sets of kids were left orphaned.) Similar losses in the Andes in the years since "Stardust" disappeared leave me shaking my head at just how dangerous it was to fly the older aircraft vs. newer ones capable of higher altitudes, with better radar guidance, better maps, and a much better understanding of the Jet Stream.
...and how are the pilots of those Argentine Pulquis shown engaged in the "intensive search effort" going to spot anything flying tight formations and doing barrel rolls? I know 99% of the time it's unrelated stock footage but I wouldn't mind a little more effort in matching the emotional tone if they can't at least be technically accurate. It just feels kind of like a news report about actual military strikes using some half-time flyover footage.
My grandfather who served usaf as an aircraft maintenance personnel mentioned the code "stendeck" (might remimber in correctly but similar) as a code to indicate coming in hot for landing (with mechanical issues) emergency response on stand by, idk if this existed back then as well but there you go.
When you write down Stardust in morse code, and then put Stendec down next to it, the dots and dashes are not far different to each other. It's only my theory, but I do not believe the last coded transmitted message from Stardust was Stendec, more like 'ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs Stardust', and it was just misheard by the radio operator at Santiago as Stendec. As I said it is only my theory, I'm no accident investigator
And the term STENDEC was familiar to UK / US military aviation, naval and merchant marine radio operators - not so much Chilean ATC of the day. If they did incorrectly interpret the morse code and got STENDEC this might help understand why they were mystified by the term.
@A Publick Domain Yes. However, we're looking back through the lens of 75 years at a video with global vision (Internet). Back then, even the ICAO didn't have approval authority from all countries. It would be no surprise to find that BSAA didn't get a statement from the Santiago controller for weeks (or more) post-mishap. Many of the bureaucracies on the continent were stovepipes. So, they would report straight up their chain of concern only and it would be up to the company to work through British diplomatic channels to overcome that. Not surprisingly, Human Factors didn't widely come into play in air mishap investigations until the mid-50s. So, you have a double impact: very few people would've been aware of the known details of the accident and even fewer would've known what to do with the information. By the time the BSAA got all the known details they would've been preoccupied with the one of the other Lancastrian accidents, desperately trying to exercise damage control as well as some accident prevention. MHO
No, they were sending "ETA SANTIAGO 17:45 HRS SCTI AR." 'STENDEC" has EXACTLY the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR. SCTI was the four letter code for the Santiago airport at the time, and AR is a radio prosign which means "end of transmission." When you're bouncing around in a cockpit trying to send Morse with a straight key, sometimes the spacing can get messed up. Plus the guy copying the message may not have copied it correctly.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing"
"STENDEC" is the same dot-dash pattern as "SCTI AR" "SCTI" is the 4 letter designation for Santiago's Los Cerrillos Airport and "AR" is short hand for "Acknowledge and Repeat". The Airman was rushing through his transmission and airport radioman was a stickler about pauses between letters and proper format. He was expecting "ETA SCTI 17.45 AR" What he got was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 SCTIAR". At this point the radioman at Los Cerrillos got annoyed with the airman so he deliberately misinterpreted the message and kept asking for clarificarion of "STENDEC" as a way of aggravating the Airman. "SCTI AR" was how the majority of transmissions to him ended and he was very familiar with its dit-dah pattern, he was just being a prick. I guess he decided it wasnt a good idea to admit he was screwing with the planes radio operator just before the crash.
I have made the trip from Santiago to Buenos Aires several times in the US Naval Mission plane .DC ? The plane was not pressurized and we passed around a small cylinder of Oxygen to ward off the elevation sickness. We had taken a pathway through the Andes because the plane was not powerful enough to go over the peaks . I was VERY sick from lack of oxygen so when it was my turn with the bottle I held on to it as long as I could . Having this experience I know how BAD it gets with altitude sickness. I think this is what happened to the crew and passengers of this plane
If these aircraft didn’t have in flight de icing, it could explain what happened. Maybe they indeed flew too high, and the frigid icy conditions caused the wings to freeze over, causing a stall and sudden drop of altitude. This I believe would be a non-recoverable situation, and thus them slamming into to glacier.
Why are there what appears to be Mig 15s in this video? ... first at 4:36 and then a whole wing of Mig 15s at 4:39?? How strange to see North Korean Mig 15s, flying over the Chilean Andes, looking for a WWII coverted Lancaster bomber!!!
Non-sequitur: “We pilots had all been warned not to enter cloud over the mountains” - well he didn’t because he was sure he was past the mountains -based on flight timing that didn’t account for the jetstream headwinds. One theory is that STENDEC was a garbled attempt at teletyping STARTING DESCENT while fighting turbulence as they dropped toward the leeward side of the mountains.
Yep. The morse backs that up. STENDEC moving the space one letter and oopsing the R is STATDEC ... and an unanticipated headwind would not only have put them behind their estimated position but caused a nasty downdraft in the lee of the mountains... and DME wasn't really a thing in 1946. You had radio beams and non-directional beacons, but VORs were just coming in in '46 and probably Santiago would've only had an NDB... DME wasn't for another five or six years. There's a reason they call it "dead reckoning." You reckon wrong....
A related theory on the Wikipedia page might work better: “The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. In Morse code, determining accurate spacing between characters is vital to properly interpret the message; STENDEC uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, "over"). SCTI AR is a transmission that would have been expected to occur in the given context.”
I love that there are a hundred comments all giving the *obviously bogus* acronym explanation from that old Guardian article they found on Wikipedia/Google and each one seems to think he alone has cracked it.
It has also been found in documents of the time, that they would have encountered a head wind. O had seen a documentary on this flight several years ago. As I recall this Flight was over the Andes at night with that head wind. This would have caused this aircraft to have been slowed down in flight. At a time when Navigation was done by a sextant, a watch, a map and math calculations wit a pencil, paper and a slide rule , it would have been very easy for the navigator to get the position of the aircraft wrong, especially at night without the ability to see where they were. Miscalculating thir position by just 5 minutes and starting their turns and decent early is the most likely cause of this mishap.
that will do for me, i got the impression the video was going to solve the mystery of the messages and crash, or solve something, but neither, it's good to get some sort of closure and your explanation is the best. Also seems it was a very, very, very long flight and the crew would be getting excited about reaching the destination, if it was a 5 min to early decent it is very feasible thanks
The Guardian newspaper suggests that STENDEC was a Second World War acronym for Severe Turbulence Encountered Decending Emergency Crash-landing. As it is the Guardian I expect it is wrong!😉
It's one thing if it got sent once. Maybe an error with the equipment or signal. Or maybe the operator had a mind slip and just wrote nonsense. But the fact that when asked to repeat he sent the same thing back means it was most likely on purpose. It must mean something to someone, probably government/military related.
With manually keyed Morse Code it is pretty common to be able to identify an individual operator by his "hand," i.e. the way he keys his dots & dashes. Automated Morse Code is uniform. My point being, if his habit is to slur things together, thus smushing SCTI AR into STENDEC, it would not be unusual to have that same compression on his 2nd transmission.
I recall hearing about this story as a kid (a LONG time ago.) After this video, here is what makes the most sense: Mild hypoxia + serious updrafts & downdrafts + imperfect visibility + rushed (or just misread) code transmission + enough icing to lose a little altitude = controlled flight into a mountain. We know about hundreds of plane crashes that occurred due to experiencing half those problems! Flying over frozen mountains is very serious business in 1940's-technology aircraft! I do not fault any of the brave men who piloted that craft.
Read about STENDEC in the 80s as a child, long before the wreckage was found (as a collection of UFO related stories). Never even knew the wreckage was found in '98, closing that chapter. Final message transmitted at 17.41 HRS (5:41 pm), estimated time of arrival 17.45 HRS. Possibly meant "Starting Descent" although STENDEC is not any sort of used abbreviation indicating a preparation to land.
STENDEC uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, AR=over). So it was not the Pilot's last words.
Absolutely. Los Cerrillos AP had the ICAO code SCTI (what pilots would use as a reference to the control tower, and the IATA code ULT (what would be on a passenger's ticket). All it would take is inconsistent timing on spaces (should be seven dots' worth between words, but could have been shorter).
Actually, AR = "End of transmission." R = "over." But yeah, no big mystery here, just poorly spaced Morse code and/or someone not copying it correctly.
My older brother had a bunch of Gold Key comics he had bought in a multipack. One of them was an issue of _UFO and Outer Space_- which had a one-page short about this aircraft. It focused on the mysterious word "Stendec" and not much else. Interesting to see that this long-ago mystery is alive and well...
Being the crew was in the war and all pilots had to be extremely well versed in Morse Code, it would be weird to repeat the same mistake unless the receiver was getting it wrong. I met an Ace from WW2, Marine Aviator, Bruce Porter Col., who stated in his biography that you could have been an amazing pilot but if you couldn't do morse code, they washed you out. I'm sure it is the same way for the Brits, so those guys wouldn't be making that mistake. I also find it absolutely nuts that they would descend into darkness in a mountain range (I learned to fly in Alaska). That the engines were running well and the gear was up, that is indicative of a mistake, probably due to math saying we went x distance as we have flown this time. Just hard to imagine WW2 pilots making that mistake.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing".
Why would you transmit your ETA and destination, while at the same time transmitting that you're crashing in such a cryptic way? The old WWII airport designation code makes much more sense.
One quibble. It's not because the glacier will keep melting that they expect more wreckage to appear. It's because the glacier keeps _growing_. Glaciers are not stone. Especially ones on mountains. As more snow accumulates at the top, it presses down into ice. Which pushes the ice below lower down the mountain. Until it gets to an altitude where it can melt.
@@WALTERBROADDUS , the crew as stated were ex- WW2 RAF. I think the simplest answer is the truest one here. I left service on 2012, and it took me four years to quit using acronyms I learned...
Why the repeated shots of F86 Sabre jets, or perhaps Mig 15s? What relevance have fighters to the story? As a retired military and commercial pilot I was taught that flight at high altitude without oxygen is very unwise due to reduced cognitive functions. 15,000 feet altitude is very far above the safe altitude without oxygen; it was an accident waiting to happen. This is almost certainly was due to human factors, with adverse weather factors.
not too difficult 5;41 message received indicating a 5;47 arrival time. Massage sent twice indicating normal proceedures. English as first language crew, spanish as first language reciver of message. STENCEC could simply be STARDUST misunderstood in morse transltion. Unless STENCEC is some old term used during the war(many exmilitary often used old military out of habit, it had to be sometking lost in translation. As for the crash, the crew were further from airfield than thought and decended too early. (not a good thing in the mountains
Note for those who don't know. Footage is either of Lancaster bombers, or an Avro York. The York was similar to the Lancaster with four Merlin engines but had a different body and tri-tail. Winston Churchill had a York as his private aircraft during the war.
STar Dust /STen Deck at altitude if the oxygen supply had been emptied and the operator had sucumbed to altitude he may have tapped out the starts of the words but failed the following letters
Excellent research. Unlike Hollywood, in the real world it can take more than 60 minutes to get all the answers to a mystery. ---- Thanks for the great upload. ----
STENDEC could also mean Stardust TEN thousand (or perhaps minutes) DECending. If it was flying through the lower edge of the Jet Stream, which would have slowed its ground speed. Since navigation was based on air speed (which would then be used to calculate ground speed), they likely thought they were near Santiago and started their descent. Based on their ETA and dead reckoning navigation they probably thought they were close to their destination but were instead still over the Andes.
Again your video clips do not match the narrative. It would be better if you just showed a blank screen rather that confuse the viewers with unrelated footage.
Subject starts at 3 minutes for those that have watched a dozen other Lancaster history videos. Could STENDEC be a turbulence mis-tap on a morse switch?
Hitting rocks in clouds is one of the most common causes of mountain flying crashes. The "mysterious" last message has already been logically explained as an operator not copying Morse code correctly. Did you do any research on this? Even reading the Wikipedia article gives more answers than this. Just terrible.
STENDEC uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, "over"). can be found even on wiki...
Since this is about a Lancastrian Civil aircraft it would be far better if most of the photos were not of Lancasters, Yorks and even a couple of Migs.. The story is interesting, but the video featuring aircraft that are not part of the story spoil it.
Thin story. Not a lot of info. Nothing remarkable to any of the info. The video could have been half as long. Mush less actually. Or rather the audio could be. The visuals of video itself has almost noting to do with the audio. Or the story. Seems to be a lot of this on the channel lately. Or maybe it has always been this way and I just did not notice. Either way the result is I am less and less interested in selecting your videos.
I really doubt it was an impact on the mountains as that would have been a surprise and instantaneous. That would not have given the radio operator time to send a message once let alone twice. Let alone not a mayday
Under a deep cloud coverage, that could be a real possibility. Remember Air New Zealand Flight 901. Due to a navigation mistake, they didn't realized they were dead.
It's always intrigued me that STENDEC has never been deciphered. It was sent 2-3 times, so it wasn't a mistake. The radio operator had military experience, yet no military member has shed any light on it's meaning. Maybe the Morris Code receiver made a mistake...?
Someone also mentioned that the radio operator was rushing the code (and made a mistake), and the receiver got annoyed so he was screwing with them by asking him to repeat it. But after the accident, obviously wouldnt want to admit to doing that. Also a plausible theory
@@flexinclouds No, not really. Emergency Crash landing is redundant, so not really a military thing that would be put into an acronym. Emergency Landing (probable) Crash Landing (maybe, but highly doubtful) I think whoever "solved" that mystery is just trying to sound smart. And that "someone's account" hasn't been cooberated by anyone else from that era.
No idea what word STENDEC meant? Many flights have ended tragically just short of their intended arrival point. Bad weather causes many crashes. Buddy Holly was one... I witnessed a crash site of small plane, that occurred on a foggy morning. The plane was on approach, and only half a mile from the airport of destination. Pilot was not IFR rated, sadly.
If the majority of the aircraft debris were entombed in the upper part of the glacier, it will all emerge at the tongue eventually as the glacier moves down the slope. That could take anywhere from decades to centuries, depending on how fast the ice is moving.
The aircraft you are showing with the tri tailfin is an Avro York. but likely very little if any footage of an actual Lancastrian, so why not show its cousin the York.
Enjoy your stories, but not the lack of continuity between narration and video showing aircraft that are certainly not he ones being referred to. Interesting old footage, just it frequently does not match the story.
4 minutes out/50 miles from destination and buried in a glacier for 50 years. It wasn't until I heard that it was one of the only aircraft that could reach that height that the whole thing stopped sounding so fishy. Then again, Stardust could have been running from a UFO. Which might be in the glacier too. And I've seen that movie. Do Not Dig Up the UFO.
The "severe turbulence" acronym won't withstand even the slightest amount of critical thinking. It's very obviously a "backronym" that someone pulled out of their bum. 1) if it were used in WWII, it would be easily provable. Thousands of people would have to be aware of it for it to be a useful way to communicate. 2) severe turbulence rarely, if ever, forces a plane to the ground with time to talk about it. You either move out of the turbulence, go through it, or crash trying. 3) there's no such thing as "crash landing" in the Andes. Only crashing. No one would attempt any sort of landing there. You fly, or you die. 4) the addition of "now" is especially absurd. What other time could you possibly be talking about crash landing?
Thanks for another interesting video. I'm surprised that someone didn't understand what STENDEC meant. Military people typically use code that is very familiar to everyone from their service. Did anyone investigate the idea that the person receiving the message transposed one or more letters?
@@JackHudler Meh, you could say its a shot in the mist based on my grandpas input from his commercial flight days. Hes an old Navy guy and has all sorts of acronyms to fit pretty much any FUBAR moment.
Disclaimer: I an not experienced with aviation lingo and abbreviations that would have been in use at the time. I am assuming the radio operator hearing the message would have been experienced, and because the message was repeated, it was received correctly. However, the operator could have applied the same listening bias to the message both times. The pattern of “STENDEC” with different intersymbol spacing could also be “SKED AR.” SKED being a possible abbreviation for the word “scheduled.” AR here in the US, is a chording together of the letters A and R with no space used as a procedural symbol, and whose meaning is “out” or “end of transmission.” My guess is this has already been considered and dismissed as interpretation of the mysterious STENDEC.
Found the plane at 15,000 feet in the side of a mountain. Cause, accidental contact with elevated terrain. No cockpit guidance saying terrain, terain, pull up, pull up, chime chime. Plowed right in, engines running. No cockpit voice recorder.
Reading the comments below, this is feeling like one of the least-researched and most "stretched to fill time" Dark series videos yet. And that's saying something knowing this channel.
Hey TH-cam. Every ad you stick in a video that can't be skipped, I add to the list. The list of products I will NEVER buy.
buy an ad blocker...worth the money
@@michaelwray9501 There's ad blockers that aren't free?
@@CeeKayz0rz Not if you watch on an iPad, which I need to do. They only work on PCs, as far as I know.
I have subscribed to TH-cam premium and don’t see them 😄
Hey You Tube. Start running adds for water, food, and clothes.
The "mystery" was already solved! Due to head wind caused by the jet stream, navigator miscalculated the covered distance, pilot started to descend before traversing high mountain peaks. Journey took place in August( winter south of equator) ,Due to "Dark Skies" it was too difficult to distinguish between clouds and snow covered peaks. CFT, The end!
Yes, there was a very interesting and informative TV programme about this a few years ago. Mystery? What mystery?
What did sedec mean as he started it but didn't tell us maybee u can cheers
@@ColinH1973 Yes, it was a BBC documentary and I still have it on video tape. That's how long ago it was aired!
Did I miss what STENDEC at the end of the message meant? If so, please let me know. If not, then the mystery is still unexplained.
@@Murph_. its a military code message ,
if you replace the first 'E' with an 'A' then you get STAN-DEC which could be an abbreviation for STANDARD DECENT and that the plane flew into the mountain because the pilots thought they had cleared the mountain range.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing"
@@panzerjagertigerporsche
The entire message was
"ETA Santiago 17.45hrs STENDEC"
The patterns of dots and dashes for STENDEC is the same as SCTI AR.
The 4 letter code for Santiago's Los Cerrillos airpot is "SCTI" .
"AR" means "Acknowledge and repeat"
So the message was actually
"ETA SANTIAGO 17.45HRS SCTI AR"
What threw the airport radio operator at the airport off was the syntax of the message.
He would have expected
"ETA SCTI 17.45 HRS AR"
( Estimated time of arrival at Santiago's Los Cerrillos Airport 5:45 PM , Acknowledge and repeat.)
Instead the planes operator sent.
"ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS SCTI AR"
(Estimated time of arrival at Santiago 5:45 pm, Santiago's Los Cerrilos Airport acknowledge and repeat.)
This confused the airports radio operator so he sent back " STENDEC " and the plane operator responded back "SCTI AR"
( remember its the same pattern of dots and dashes)
"STENDEC"?
"SCTI AR"!
After several back and forths between the planes operator and the airport the plane hit the mountain and you had a confused airport radio operator wondering what the Hell "STENDEC" meant.
@@glennchartrand5411 that is a lengthy explanation for a UFO abduction
@@pizzafrenzyman I debunk for a hobby , so I picked up the habit of going into deep detail , because if you just say:
"STENDEC is the same dit-dah pattern as STCI AR which is a standard and expected radio message."
You get a lot of UFO believers challenging and insulting you so I just dump all the information on them at once.
I have to tell them what the entire message was, how easy it is for the radio operator to misinterpret the message and what "SCTI AR" actually means.
@@glennchartrand5411 Excellent. I was agreeing with your original comment. Your explanation and my theory are not mutually exclusive.
Solution to the mystery?
Convert STENDEC to International Code: ... /_ /. / _. / _.. / . / _._.
Just change the spacing a bit and we get: ... /_._. / _ /.. /._ ._.
You can look it up. That spells SCTI AR.
SCTI was the old ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) abbreviation for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, which is where they were headed.
As an Extra Class radio operator (and Pilot) I encountered such sloppy spacing many, many times. Also, I was required to know that AR meant "end of transmission," and sent and received it at the end of countless messages.
The mis-copied message was: ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC. Correcting the spacing and paraphrasing, we get: "Estimated time of Arrival Santiago 17.45 Hours, Los Cerillos Airport Santiago. End of transmission."
This is detailed in the Wikipedia listing for the crash.
Chris Bart, W8IG
I've heard this theory before, and it explains a lot. I think this is the most logical explanation.
Good work de VK3WL
Add possible hypoxia and/or turbulence for some sloppy code and it all makes sense. Thank you.
@@vk3wl VK3WL DE W8IG TNX 73 W8IG QRT
Nice work dude. 73 KC8SGJ
Just because something is repeated, doesn't mean it isn't a mistake. There are many different reasons why someone would repeat an incorrect transmission, such as wrong codes, faulty and uncomfortable equipment, mental fog caused by extreme altitude sickness or low pressure, distractions caused by an emergency situation taking their attention away, someone else manning the communications because the trained person was unable to...
Star Tiger and Star Aerial, two Avro Tudors of the same airline, disappeared without trace in 1948 & 1949 respectively whilst flying to and from Bermuda. Their loss has remained a mystery. Worth a companion vid.
The cabin was unpresurised, the radio operator could well have been suffering mental confusion due to the effects of hypoxia when flying at 20,000 feet. Rearrange the letters of stendec and you get descent, he could have been trying to say they were in the descent phase of the flight.
Exactly
That was my first thought... it's an anagram of DESCENT.
Very interesting, I live in Jamaica and during WW2 a US navy Kingfisher (squadron VS-60) disappeared just off our south coast during a training mission in !943. It was broad daylight and 2 other planes of it's squadron were in the air and in the area at the time but no one saw it go down. It was never found.
They sent a message at 5:41 PM indicating they would arrive at Santiago at 5:45 PM. 4 minutes.
They clearly thought they were farther along on their flightpath (derived from cruising speeds of 220 to 250 knots - they must have believed they were 15 to 18 miles from Santiago)
The flightcrew were all WWII veteran RAF aviators (don't think the former RN PO had an active role in the mishap - lack of evidence).
Yes, STENDEC was one of many acronyms widely accepted by British and American aviation personnel, naval and merchant marine radio operators indicating Severe Turbulence Encountered Descending (could be a whole video on its own). However, severe turbulence constitutes an emergency and is incongruent with the regular advisory of arrival 4 minutes later...sent twice!
But John Ison, in a posting to a PBS NOVA presentation, made a very good theoretical observation that fits perfectly with that routine 5:45 arrival advisory.
"I am an experienced code op, both ham radio, military, and commercial. If a single dash is added to the beginning of STENDEC, the result is: BT END AR.
BT is a very common Morse code 'break' sequence. It separates one subject from another, the body of a message from the signature, and is very commonly used in place of the period at the end of a sentence in a casual communication. (BT is easier to send than a period AAA.) Harmer would have used it to separate the body of his message from the end as:
ETA 17.45 HRS BT
END
AR
(Take a look at a message in the ARRL HANDBOOK 1993, page 37-19.)
One item not mentioned is that Harmer was probably using 'break-in' keying. This is where actual key contacts also cause the equipment to go into transmit mode. Especially with older tube-type equipment, it is very common for the first character (in this case, a dash for each of the two successive queries that Harmer responded to) to be 'missed'. This occurs because the equipment requires a brief moment to change from receive to transmit. It occurs at the first key press after being in a receive mode. Typically, that first character is made shorter or does not get transmitted at all. The result would be exactly the letters STENDEC. It's even more possible if the operator (Harmer) was sending "very fast" as reported by the Santiago operator. Missing that dash would also make it more difficult for the Santiago operator who is trying to copy very fast code to intuitively decipher that STENDEC is really just a BT with END and AR, run together."
Different picture, right?
Routine, "We're arriving in 4 minutes, that's it". While the pilots, believing that they are 15 to 18 miles from Santiago and clear of the mountain range (and attendant volcano) begin their descent for approach. It is true that in 1946 they did not have a good grasp of the jetstream. They were 50 miles from Santiago. The post-crash avalanche theory explains why the aircraft disappeared without a trace - for 50 some years. Meteorological conditions could have easily prevented the second officer from accurately calculating their position, especially if they were in the soup. My only question would be in reference to ground station fly-over beacons. They were in use as early as the mid to late 30s in other mountainous areas of South America, but not there?
Additionally, D Erbe explained the use of these code words...
The word STENDEC means:
"Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-Landing."
Let me explain. During World War II, Allied convoys crossing the Atlantic would encounter U-boats. Some of the Allied ships came equipped with rocket-launched fighters-P-40s or Spitfires-which were launched to attack any U-boats. These planes could not land back on the ships and so were termed "throwaway" planes. When a pilot ran out of ammo or fuel, he would send a short Morse message, EDAS, meaning "Emergency Ditch at Sea." Allied ships in the area would triangulate on the plane's position, and the nearest Coast Guard or Navy ship would go pick up the pilot, who had ejected" (bailed out) "from his plane.
EDAS was an intentional ditch, whereas STENDEC implied an unintentional ditch due to bad weather or for some other reason. It meant essentially "My plane's in trouble, I may have to ditch, so please triangulate my position and be prepared to pick me up."
When I saw the word STENDEC on the NOVA program, I remembered seeing that word in a book somewhere. I couldn't find the reference, so I went and asked my father, who is nearly 80 years old and who served in the Merchant Marine during the war. He said that he sat across from the radio operator on his ship and heard the word STENDEC-with the meaning given above-all the time from these convoy-protecting pilots.
Maybe the pilot in control of Stardust ran into severe turbulence in the Andes. Perhaps the wings were icing over, affecting lift; possibly an engine was knocked loose from its mounts. In any case, the plane was going down. The radio operator had seconds to convey the plane's emergency situation. Either the radio operator or the pilot, who had flown over 100 missions in the war, knew this word STENDEC and tapped it out-very fast as the Chilean radio operator remembered.
I hope this helps to clear up the mystery."
Great insight into how the code words were used and kind of explains why many people were not that familiar with them. However, I still think John Ison is onto something in the morse code sequence itself, related to hastily executed coding/decoding. Hey, it was 1946. People were doing the best they could with the technology at hand.
There have been more than a few modern aircraft that have happily flown straight into mountains due to pilot or instrument error, I'm surprised it didn't happen more often in the early days of commercial aviation.
A B-17 flew into a Mountain 🏔️ in Oxford County Maine in 1944. My Grandfather was a Scoutmaster who helped to recover the bodies with his Scout Troop. An Antique Heirloom Ring was aboard the plane,and was never found. Bears and Coyotes ate parts of the bodies before Recovery.
A lot of shots of the high-wing "York" transport which had a different fuselage to the "Lancastrian": there are also others of "Lancaster" bombers in camouflage.
Yes, it used Lancaster wings and tail but with a purpose-designed body...
As if there is a ton of footage at all?
This channel has a history of using incorrect and irrelevant footage and stills.
@@cameraman655 If you think you can find enough accurate historical footage, why don't you try and start your own channel?
@@macjim Churchill's private aircraft. An RAF ONE, if you will. Rumor is he had an electrically-heated head.
I was always intrigued by the fact that STENDEC is an anagram of descent.
Me too. Also, if turbulence was a factor, maybe the radio op. Meant to spell descent but morse coded it wrong from all the buffeting?
Read the post above... what they were sending was SCTI AR. SCTI was the old four letter code for Santiago, and AR is the radio code in Morse for "end of transmission." The radio operator on the aircraft just screwed up the spacing.
S ... T _ E . N _. D _.. E . C _._.
S ... C _._. T _ I .. AR ._._.
The dits & dahs all work out the same. When someone's sending on a straight key, especially if they're on an aircraft which might be going through turbulence, then it's not out of the question that the spacing might get messed up.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing"
@A Publick Domain maybe good old Lady Luck turned on them and Murphy's Law kicked in
@@dx1450 Once maybe. But three times ? Not likely.
My father was in the US Foreign Service in the 1960s and we lived in Santiago for a number of years. During that time, there was at least one US military flight (heading to Panama) piloted by an experienced crew that flew almost directly into a mountainside in an accident attributed to low visibility & high turbulence. (With this particular accident, at least two sets of kids were left orphaned.) Similar losses in the Andes in the years since "Stardust" disappeared leave me shaking my head at just how dangerous it was to fly the older aircraft vs. newer ones capable of higher altitudes, with better radar guidance, better maps, and a much better understanding of the Jet Stream.
"A commercial flight took off "(Showes vid of Avro Manchester). Nice.
I’m sure the nose guns help deter air pirates.
...and how are the pilots of those Argentine Pulquis shown engaged in the "intensive search effort" going to spot anything flying tight formations and doing barrel rolls? I know 99% of the time it's unrelated stock footage but I wouldn't mind a little more effort in matching the emotional tone if they can't at least be technically accurate. It just feels kind of like a news report about actual military strikes using some half-time flyover footage.
Nit Picking...
@@FreakyRufus Don Karnage would just let this one pass on by.
My grandfather who served usaf as an aircraft maintenance personnel mentioned the code "stendeck" (might remimber in correctly but similar) as a code to indicate coming in hot for landing (with mechanical issues) emergency response on stand by, idk if this existed back then as well but there you go.
Coincidentally, one of the last two Lancaster bombers just flew over my house a few times today...
I am so jealous.
Vera?
Did you live?
@@anonymike8280 They couldn't pick up the Oboe signal. 1944 was too far away.
U mean flyers. There are another 2 that should fly again one day
When you write down Stardust in morse code, and then put Stendec down next to it, the dots and dashes are not far different to each other. It's only my theory, but I do not believe the last coded transmitted message from Stardust was Stendec, more like 'ETA Santiago 17:45 hrs Stardust', and it was just misheard by the radio operator at Santiago as Stendec. As I said it is only my theory, I'm no accident investigator
And the term STENDEC was familiar to UK / US military aviation, naval and merchant marine radio operators - not so much Chilean ATC of the day. If they did incorrectly interpret the morse code and got STENDEC this might help understand why they were mystified by the term.
@A Publick Domain Yes. However, we're looking back through the lens of 75 years at a video with global vision (Internet). Back then, even the ICAO didn't have approval authority from all countries. It would be no surprise to find that BSAA didn't get a statement from the Santiago controller for weeks (or more) post-mishap. Many of the bureaucracies on the continent were stovepipes. So, they would report straight up their chain of concern only and it would be up to the company to work through British diplomatic channels to overcome that. Not surprisingly, Human Factors didn't widely come into play in air mishap investigations until the mid-50s. So, you have a double impact: very few people would've been aware of the known details of the accident and even fewer would've known what to do with the information. By the time the BSAA got all the known details they would've been preoccupied with the one of the other Lancastrian accidents, desperately trying to exercise damage control as well as some accident prevention. MHO
No, they were sending "ETA SANTIAGO 17:45 HRS SCTI AR." 'STENDEC" has EXACTLY the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR. SCTI was the four letter code for the Santiago airport at the time, and AR is a radio prosign which means "end of transmission." When you're bouncing around in a cockpit trying to send Morse with a straight key, sometimes the spacing can get messed up. Plus the guy copying the message may not have copied it correctly.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing"
"STENDEC" is the same dot-dash pattern as "SCTI AR"
"SCTI" is the 4 letter designation for Santiago's Los Cerrillos Airport and "AR" is short hand for "Acknowledge and Repeat".
The Airman was rushing through his transmission and airport radioman was a stickler about pauses between letters and proper format.
He was expecting
"ETA SCTI 17.45 AR"
What he got was
"ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 SCTIAR".
At this point the radioman at Los Cerrillos got annoyed with the airman so he deliberately misinterpreted the message and kept asking for clarificarion of "STENDEC" as a way of aggravating the Airman.
"SCTI AR" was how the majority of transmissions to him ended and he was very familiar with its dit-dah pattern, he was just being a prick.
I guess he decided it wasnt a good idea to admit he was screwing with the planes radio operator just before the crash.
I have made the trip from Santiago to Buenos Aires several times in the US Naval Mission plane .DC ? The plane was not pressurized and we passed around a small cylinder of Oxygen to ward off the elevation sickness. We had taken a pathway through the Andes because the plane was not powerful enough to go over the peaks . I was VERY sick from lack of oxygen so when it was my turn with the bottle I held on to it as long as I could . Having this experience I know how BAD it gets with altitude sickness. I think this is what happened to the crew and passengers of this plane
Very compelling video without going sensationalistic Thank you so much
If these aircraft didn’t have in flight de icing, it could explain what happened. Maybe they indeed flew too high, and the frigid icy conditions caused the wings to freeze over, causing a stall and sudden drop of altitude. This I believe would be a non-recoverable situation, and thus them slamming into to glacier.
NB This video only contains 1 second of an Avro Lancastrian.
Why are there what appears to be Mig 15s in this video? ... first at 4:36 and then a whole wing of Mig 15s at 4:39?? How strange to see North Korean Mig 15s, flying over the Chilean Andes, looking for a WWII coverted Lancaster bomber!!!
It's well known that those aircraft would turn up in the strangest places, at the strangest times. This may indeed be one of the strangest.
Ignore the Haters like we do... Keep making Informative & Entertaining DarkTubes!
It's dangerous to go down these tubes alone!
Wow! Those aliens must have been really clever to get all that debris planted in that glacier like that and make it look like an accident!!
Clever girl!
Of course they're clever. They couldn't get all the way here if they weren't
@@oxcart4172 This is true. Of course, they may have been lost. Happens to the best of us sometimes.
We had nothing to do with your silly aircraft stuffing themselves.
@@billboyd4051 😂🤣😂😅
Just discovered your channel 👍loving it !
Excellent work from KF0AXH.
I am also former Commercial Pilot, CFII and Flight Engineer.
Non-sequitur: “We pilots had all been warned not to enter cloud over the mountains” - well he didn’t because he was sure he was past the mountains -based on flight timing that didn’t account for the jetstream headwinds. One theory is that STENDEC was a garbled attempt at teletyping STARTING DESCENT while fighting turbulence as they dropped toward the leeward side of the mountains.
Yep. The morse backs that up. STENDEC moving the space one letter and oopsing the R is STATDEC ... and an unanticipated headwind would not only have put them behind their estimated position but caused a nasty downdraft in the lee of the mountains... and DME wasn't really a thing in 1946. You had radio beams and non-directional beacons, but VORs were just coming in in '46 and probably Santiago would've only had an NDB... DME wasn't for another five or six years.
There's a reason they call it "dead reckoning." You reckon wrong....
Two times.
A related theory on the Wikipedia page might work better:
“The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. In Morse code, determining accurate spacing between characters is vital to properly interpret the message; STENDEC uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, "over"). SCTI AR is a transmission that would have been expected to occur in the given context.”
Were there marker beacons in the Andes? During WWII the military flew over these mountains A LOT. So beacons should have been present.
I love that there are a hundred comments all giving the *obviously bogus* acronym explanation from that old Guardian article they found on Wikipedia/Google and each one seems to think he alone has cracked it.
Some lovely shots of 685 Yorks
It has also been found in documents of the time, that they would have encountered a head wind. O had seen a documentary on this flight several years ago. As I recall this Flight was over the Andes at night with that head wind. This would have caused this aircraft to have been slowed down in flight. At a time when Navigation was done by a sextant, a watch, a map and math calculations wit a pencil, paper and a slide rule , it would have been very easy for the navigator to get the position of the aircraft wrong, especially at night without the ability to see where they were. Miscalculating thir position by just 5 minutes and starting their turns and decent early is the most likely cause of this mishap.
that will do for me, i got the impression the video was going to solve the mystery of the messages and crash, or solve something, but neither, it's good to get some sort of closure and your explanation is the best. Also seems it was a very, very, very long flight and the crew would be getting excited about reaching the destination, if it was a 5 min to early decent it is very feasible thanks
Here in the USA on PBS Nova they have already shown a much more modern documentary about this crash. And yes, much more debris has been found.
Good to know, thanks
The Guardian newspaper suggests that STENDEC was a Second World War acronym for Severe Turbulence Encountered Decending Emergency Crash-landing. As it is the Guardian I expect it is wrong!😉
Wonder what Spin Pilger would put on it 😀
Son, The Guardian is fake. I didn't want to tell you, but the time has come.
If the STENDEC transmission also included an ETA for the destination airport ... 'Emergency Crash-landing' makes no sense.
It's one thing if it got sent once. Maybe an error with the equipment or signal. Or maybe the operator had a mind slip and just wrote nonsense. But the fact that when asked to repeat he sent the same thing back means it was most likely on purpose. It must mean something to someone, probably government/military related.
I'd like to know if if the other three engines were working at point of impact
Or that the sender has a misunderstanding of telegram coding
With manually keyed Morse Code it is pretty common to be able to identify an individual operator by his "hand," i.e. the way he keys his dots & dashes. Automated Morse Code is uniform.
My point being, if his habit is to slur things together, thus smushing SCTI AR into STENDEC, it would not be unusual to have that same compression on his 2nd transmission.
Stendec. Stardust encountered nav difficulty expecting crash.
My theory anyway.
@@deeperry8341 Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-Landing
I recall hearing about this story as a kid (a LONG time ago.) After this video, here is what makes the most sense: Mild hypoxia + serious updrafts & downdrafts + imperfect visibility + rushed (or just misread) code transmission + enough icing to lose a little altitude = controlled flight into a mountain. We know about hundreds of plane crashes that occurred due to experiencing half those problems! Flying over frozen mountains is very serious business in 1940's-technology aircraft! I do not fault any of the brave men who piloted that craft.
Excellent ! Keep up the good work. 👍👍👍👍👍
Read about STENDEC in the 80s as a child, long before the wreckage was found (as a collection of UFO related stories). Never even knew the wreckage was found in '98, closing that chapter.
Final message transmitted at 17.41 HRS (5:41 pm), estimated time of arrival 17.45 HRS. Possibly meant "Starting Descent" although STENDEC is not any sort of used abbreviation indicating a preparation to land.
STENDEC uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, AR=over). So it was not the Pilot's last words.
Absolutely. Los Cerrillos AP had the ICAO code SCTI (what pilots would use as a reference to the control tower, and the IATA code ULT (what would be on a passenger's ticket). All it would take is inconsistent timing on spaces (should be seven dots' worth between words, but could have been shorter).
Actually, AR = "End of transmission." R = "over." But yeah, no big mystery here, just poorly spaced Morse code and/or someone not copying it correctly.
My older brother had a bunch of Gold Key comics he had bought in a multipack. One of them was an issue of _UFO and Outer Space_- which had a one-page short about this aircraft. It focused on the mysterious word "Stendec" and not much else.
Interesting to see that this long-ago mystery is alive and well...
I don't know why the wheels left up meant not a crash landing.
If not landing on a relatively smooth surface, a belly landing is preferable.
Being the crew was in the war and all pilots had to be extremely well versed in Morse Code, it would be weird to repeat the same mistake unless the receiver was getting it wrong. I met an Ace from WW2, Marine Aviator, Bruce Porter Col., who stated in his biography that you could have been an amazing pilot but if you couldn't do morse code, they washed you out. I'm sure it is the same way for the Brits, so those guys wouldn't be making that mistake. I also find it absolutely nuts that they would descend into darkness in a mountain range (I learned to fly in Alaska). That the engines were running well and the gear was up, that is indicative of a mistake, probably due to math saying we went x distance as we have flown this time. Just hard to imagine WW2 pilots making that mistake.
It consisted of the single word "STENDEC". For years it was thought to have been mistyped but it is now thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing".
This is the best explanation I've heard !
@A Publick Domain And your expert opinion is ?
@A Publick Domain All talk, no research, it took me 5sec to Google "military acronym stendec"
Google is helpful, use it.
Nah....
Why would you transmit your ETA and destination, while at the same time transmitting that you're crashing in such a cryptic way? The old WWII airport designation code makes much more sense.
This kid has watched a lot of history shows. He's got the delivery down pat.
Your videos are the best. I think I subscribe to them all
this story transfixed me, glued me to the tube.
One quibble. It's not because the glacier will keep melting that they expect more wreckage to appear. It's because the glacier keeps _growing_. Glaciers are not stone. Especially ones on mountains. As more snow accumulates at the top, it presses down into ice. Which pushes the ice below lower down the mountain. Until it gets to an altitude where it can melt.
shhhhh I hear Greta right now screaming at the top of her lungs from reading this.
I am so intrigued with all your channels and documentaries! 👍👍
STENDEC could be an acronym for Starting End (Journey) Descent.
That does not appear to be a common message.
@@WALTERBROADDUS , the crew as stated were ex- WW2 RAF. I think the simplest answer is the truest one here. I left service on 2012, and it took me four years to quit using acronyms I learned...
@@danielhammersley2869 But there would be no mystery? Nobody used that code speak.
Please also recall that it took a while to formalize universal air call signs for Air Traffic control, and this accident occurred in 1946.
@A Publick Domain , This was in morse code wireless radio days... maybe the RAF?
Why the repeated shots of F86 Sabre jets, or perhaps Mig 15s? What relevance have fighters to the story? As a retired military and commercial pilot I was taught that flight at high altitude without oxygen is very unwise due to reduced cognitive functions. 15,000 feet altitude is very far above the safe altitude without oxygen; it was an accident waiting to happen. This is almost certainly was due to human factors, with adverse weather factors.
Could u do more vids on WW1 aircraft? Thank you, love your work.
not too difficult 5;41 message received indicating a 5;47 arrival time. Massage sent twice indicating normal proceedures. English as first language crew, spanish as first language reciver of message. STENCEC could simply be STARDUST misunderstood in morse transltion. Unless STENCEC is some old term used during the war(many exmilitary often used old military out of habit, it had to be sometking lost in translation. As for the crash, the crew were further from airfield than thought and decended too early. (not a good thing in the mountains
Note for those who don't know. Footage is either of Lancaster bombers, or an Avro York. The York was similar to the Lancaster with four Merlin engines but had a different body and tri-tail. Winston Churchill had a York as his private aircraft during the war.
STar Dust /STen Deck at altitude if the oxygen supply had been emptied and the operator had sucumbed to altitude he may have tapped out the starts of the words but failed the following letters
Excellent research. Unlike Hollywood, in the real world it can take more than 60 minutes to get all
the answers to a mystery. ---- Thanks for the great upload. ----
Another great video !!
STENDEC stands for - Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash Landing.
STENDEC could also mean Stardust TEN thousand (or perhaps minutes) DECending. If it was flying through the lower edge of the Jet Stream, which would have slowed its ground speed. Since navigation was based on air speed (which would then be used to calculate ground speed), they likely thought they were near Santiago and started their descent. Based on their ETA and dead reckoning navigation they probably thought they were close to their destination but were instead still over the Andes.
How about showing the right aircraft in the thumbnail? That was a Constellation, not a Lancastrian.
LOL! I got so confused, tx!
STENDEC is thought to be a second world war morse code acronym for: "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing".
Again your video clips do not match the narrative. It would be better if you just showed a blank screen rather that confuse the viewers with unrelated footage.
...or various "space ships" engaging/disengaging warp drive ... Cheers
Subject starts at 3 minutes for those that have watched a dozen other Lancaster history videos. Could STENDEC be a turbulence mis-tap on a morse switch?
Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-Landing
Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-Landing
Improper coding, either sending or recieving. When you have it wrong in your head you could repeat the error.
Exactly. PS ... OohRah! ^v^
@@taproom113 Semper Fi
Another well done from dark. What the Andes claims - it keeps.
Hitting rocks in clouds is one of the most common causes of mountain flying crashes. The "mysterious" last message has already been logically explained as an operator not copying Morse code correctly. Did you do any research on this? Even reading the Wikipedia article gives more answers than this. Just terrible.
Thats exactly what the lizard people would like you to believe!
STENDEC could be Spanish for COVFEFE
STENDEC uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR (the four-letter code for Los Cerrillos airport Santiago, "over"). can be found even on wiki...
If the closed captions don't work for this video, you can go to the Wikipedia page and read along.
Perhaps there was an error on a letter or two in the chaos and panic and so the intended message was a letter or two different?
I’m trying to understand why a picture of an ANG EC-121 introduces this video? Pretty strange.
I am wondering what the crews former squadron mates would have thought of the word Standec?
Since this is about a Lancastrian Civil aircraft it would be far better if most of the photos were not of Lancasters, Yorks and even a couple of Migs.. The story is interesting, but the video featuring aircraft that are not part of the story spoil it.
Black box information now shows that when others say “I they would never do that” that’s exactly what they did
STENDEC stands for sudden turbulence effecting nose dive and emergency crash
Stendec was the code to say that the British diplomat was on board with the classified files and required max security on landing.
I believe MH 370 sent the same code
What did a thumbnail of a EC-121 Super Constellation over Vietnam have to do with a Avro Lancastrian crashing into Argentina, South America?
Thin story. Not a lot of info. Nothing remarkable to any of the info. The video could have been half as long. Mush less actually. Or rather the audio could be. The visuals of video itself has almost noting to do with the audio. Or the story. Seems to be a lot of this on the channel lately. Or maybe it has always been this way and I just did not notice. Either way the result is I am less and less interested in selecting your videos.
I agree this videos seem to be declining dramatically in quality. Blocked. It's not worth my time anymore.
Sir can I use ur videos some parts in my video ? Rply immediately
And the picture on the photo to choose the video is a Lockheed Constellation, right?
Where I'm from, hauling the mail means something is pretty damn quick.
How ironic is that these days?
Agree "Haulin the Mail" A boat racing phrase = Out front and pulling away
I really doubt it was an impact on the mountains as that would have been a surprise and instantaneous. That would not have given the radio operator time to send a message once let alone twice. Let alone not a mayday
Under a deep cloud coverage, that could be a real possibility. Remember Air New Zealand Flight 901. Due to a navigation mistake, they didn't realized they were dead.
@@JackHudler My point exactly
It's always intrigued me that STENDEC has never been deciphered. It was sent 2-3 times, so it wasn't a mistake. The radio operator had military experience, yet no military member has shed any light on it's meaning. Maybe the Morris Code receiver made a mistake...?
Someone pointed out that STENDEC was a ww2 acronym for "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing". That would make sense
Someone also mentioned that the radio operator was rushing the code (and made a mistake), and the receiver got annoyed so he was screwing with them by asking him to repeat it. But after the accident, obviously wouldnt want to admit to doing that. Also a plausible theory
@@flexinclouds No, not really. Emergency Crash landing is redundant, so not really a military thing that would be put into an acronym.
Emergency Landing (probable)
Crash Landing (maybe, but highly doubtful)
I think whoever "solved" that mystery is just trying to sound smart. And that "someone's account" hasn't been cooberated by anyone else from that era.
Nice vedio sir
No idea what word STENDEC meant? Many flights have ended tragically just short of their intended arrival point.
Bad weather causes many crashes. Buddy Holly was one... I witnessed a crash site of small plane, that occurred on a foggy morning. The plane was on approach, and only half a mile from the airport of destination. Pilot was not IFR rated, sadly.
If the majority of the aircraft debris were entombed in the upper part of the glacier, it will all emerge at the tongue eventually as the glacier moves down the slope. That could take anywhere from decades to centuries, depending on how fast the ice is moving.
The aircraft you are showing with the tri tailfin is an Avro York. but likely very little if any footage of an actual Lancastrian, so why not show its cousin the York.
I was waiting on a report on the new US Fighter. Hope you can tell us some more about it.👍🏻✌🏻🖖🏻
2:25 well what would it be able to carry if it couldn't carry mail? femail?
Er...
Enjoy your stories, but not the lack of continuity between narration and video showing aircraft that are certainly not he ones being referred to. Interesting old footage, just it frequently does not match the story.
4 minutes out/50 miles from destination and buried in a glacier for 50 years.
It wasn't until I heard that it was one of the only aircraft that could reach that height that the whole thing stopped sounding so fishy.
Then again, Stardust could have been running from a UFO.
Which might be in the glacier too.
And I've seen that movie.
Do Not Dig Up the UFO.
Translated; " STENDEC" is Squawheli for "Oh Shit!"
The "severe turbulence" acronym won't withstand even the slightest amount of critical thinking. It's very obviously a "backronym" that someone pulled out of their bum.
1) if it were used in WWII, it would be easily provable. Thousands of people would have to be aware of it for it to be a useful way to communicate.
2) severe turbulence rarely, if ever, forces a plane to the ground with time to talk about it. You either move out of the turbulence, go through it, or crash trying.
3) there's no such thing as "crash landing" in the Andes. Only crashing. No one would attempt any sort of landing there. You fly, or you die.
4) the addition of "now" is especially absurd. What other time could you possibly be talking about crash landing?
King's messenger in 1947 as king George VI was still on the throne.
STENDEC is an anagram for Ed Scent. Clearly we’re looking for a stinky guy named Edward... he’s got bad gas but he’s got the answers.
Thanks for another interesting video. I'm surprised that someone didn't understand what STENDEC meant. Military people typically use code that is very familiar to everyone from their service. Did anyone investigate the idea that the person receiving the message transposed one or more letters?
@@JackHudler Do you mean that no military code would be that many letters? That makes sense. Thanks!
@@JackHudler Good thought! Thanks!
@@JackHudler Except,.. ARPANET..and ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHISPAC are both a little Longer than STENDEC...
@@JackHudler Sever Turbulence Encountered Now Descending Escape to Clear..although adding the N for "Now" ands E for "Escape" is un-needed.
@@JackHudler Meh, you could say its a shot in the mist based on my grandpas input from his commercial flight days. Hes an old Navy guy and has all sorts of acronyms to fit pretty much any FUBAR moment.
Now I can add STENDEC to COVFEFE on my list of cryptic words to work into conversations.
I appreciate that you added Green Beret film from Afghanistan into this. Lol.
And a Boeing 737.
Wasn't there also some shot of a MIG or something doing a roll at the beginning? Hah! Fun! 😏
Disclaimer: I an not experienced with aviation lingo and abbreviations that would have been in use at the time. I am assuming the radio operator hearing the message would have been experienced, and because the message was repeated, it was received correctly. However, the operator could have applied the same listening bias to the message both times. The pattern of “STENDEC” with different intersymbol spacing could also be “SKED AR.” SKED being a possible abbreviation for the word “scheduled.” AR here in the US, is a chording together of the letters A and R with no space used as a procedural symbol, and whose meaning is “out” or “end of transmission.” My guess is this has already been considered and dismissed as interpretation of the mysterious STENDEC.
I think there were some diamonds onboard if I remember correctly. I could be wrong and often am!
I thought of a bunch of cockneys on board when you said diamonds... "e's a diamond geezer 'e is!"
Found the plane at 15,000 feet in the side of a mountain. Cause, accidental contact with elevated terrain. No cockpit guidance saying terrain, terain, pull up, pull up, chime chime. Plowed right in, engines running. No cockpit voice recorder.
Wasn't a Soccer team crashed in a similar way, in the 70s ?
Reading the comments below, this is feeling like one of the least-researched and most "stretched to fill time" Dark series videos yet. And that's saying something knowing this channel.