Malaysia Airlines MH370 is only the latest in a long line of planes
that flew off the radar
The shocking
disappearance of
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has captured the attention of millions around
the world as the search for the airplane and its passengers and crew continues.
What happened to the flight’s 239 passengers and crew after the plane left
Kuala Lumpur on Saturday? It is becoming an increasingly desperate question as
the days pass.
But it’s
hardly the first mystery of its kind. While it’s extremely rare that a flight
simply vanishes with barely a trace, aviation history has seen its fair share
of enigmatic disappearances and unfortunate flights that literally flew off the
radar. Here are six of the half-solved and unsolved airline mysteries that kept
investigators clueless for years.
Air France
Flight 447: An Airbus A330 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged
into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board.
But it took a full five days for search and rescue teams to find the wreck and
another three years for investigators to report that ice crystals had caused
the autopilot to disconnect. The bodies of 74 passengers remain unrecovered.
Amelia Earhart: One of the most storied and enduring legends of aviation
history, ace pilot Amelia Earhart disappeared in her twin-engine monoplane
Electra over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 in an attempt to circumnavigate the
globe. No trace of her plane was ever found even after a multi-million dollar
search effort, and Earhart was officially declared dead in 1939.
Flying
Tiger Line Flight 739: A U.S. military flight left Guam in 1962 with more
90 personnel headed for the Philippines, but it never arrived. The pilots never
issued a distress call, and 1,300 people involved in the U.S. military search
never found any trace of wreckage. A Liberian tanker ship’s crew claim to have
seen an “intensely luminous” light in the sky at the approximate time of the
flight, but the U.S. Civil Aeronautics board ruled it was “unable to
determine the probable cause of the incident.”
British South American Airways: It took more than
50 years to find any trace of the 11 people aboard a 1947 flight that
disappeared in the Andes Mountains. A pair of Argentinian rock climbers
discovered engine wreckage in the Andes in 1998, and an army expedition later
found human remains as well. Some say the plane caused an avalanche when it
crashed into Mount Tupangato and was buried in the snow.
Bermuda
Triangle: A series of disappearances over the so-called
“Devil’s Triangle,” the vast expanse of ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico, and
Bermuda has given the region an unshakeable notoriety. Two British South
American Airways passenger jets disappeared in the region in 1948 and 1949, and
more than 51 people were lost on the two flights and never found. In 1945, five
American bombers ran a training mission over the area and were never recovered;
the aircraft charged with finding the men deployed with a 13-man crew, and also
vanished.
Uruguayan
Air Force Flight 571: A flight headed to Santiago, Chile carrying 45 passengers and crew crashed into the Andes
mountains in poor weather in 1972, killing 12 people. Authorities were unaware
of any survivors for 72 days. In the meantime, eight were killed in an
avalanche that hit the plane’s wreckage where they were taking shelter, and the
remaining 16 resorted to cannibalism to stay alive, eating the corpses of the
dead before they were finally found more than two months after disappearing out
of the sky.
Source : time.com
