The most puzzling flight disappearances ever

With the coming of the modern-day world, we now have quite a few variations of vehicles like cars, helicopters, trains, flights, etc., but the most preferred in terms of comfort and speed are flights.

Airplane flights are the most preferred and used by many of us for easy and quick flights to destinations that are quite far away.

But sometimes, there are a few accidents that take place while flying, and there are some mysterious, puzzling incidents that are yet to be solved where the flight which had flown from the airport had never gone to its destination; rather, it had disappeared in between, leaving no traces. 

So here is a list of all the puzzling flights that have disappeared and never came nor gone to their destination. 

Flying Tiger Flight 739

During the mid-march of 1962, amidst the starting stages of the Vietnam War, The Flying Tiger Flight 739, which belonged to the US Army, disappeared over the bottomless Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean on its way to the Philippines from Guam.

After one hour of the plane’s last communication, members of a Standard Oil tanker in the area reported witnessing a luminous explosion in the sky, which some investigators have linked to the plane.

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But the thing here is any air-traffic control centers received no calls regarding any problems in the plane, which made it much more difficult for investigators to pin down exactly when things began to go wrong for those onboard.

A search party was also sent to investigate the matter, which comprised 1,300 people, 48 aircraft, and eight surface vessels, to investigate area, which covers roughly 144,000 square miles. But the investigation turned out to be a massive failure as different theories regarding the vanishing went throughout the United States and the world.

These theories widely range from claims that it was accidentally shot down by the U.S. government, which then covered its tracks and blamed it on the engine and communication failure. However, the true cause remains unknown, and no one may ever know what happened.

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Flight 19, the Bermuda Triangle case

The award for the most disputed plane disappearance occurred in early December 1945, when not one but six planes had vanished anonymously, which have yet to be recovered.

On the day that the planes disappeared, five Avenger torpedo bombers, which are well-known in the aviation community for their power and strength, were taken off from their base FT. Lauderdale, Florida, for bombing practice in what has since become known as the Bermuda Triangle.

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But the problem happened when the planes started experiencing some problems with their compasses, all the planes lost communication with the ground station.

But the ground station could still follow communications between the pilots of the planes, during which it was noted that they became disoriented about their locations and decided that once the first plane dropped below 10 gallons of fuel, all planes were to ditch to the sea.

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An intensive rescue mission was started immediately to rescue the planes and fighters, the Coast Guard and navy, that covered 700,000 square kilometers over five days. During that time, another plane carrying 13 passengers disappeared and was never found again like the others.

The only clue that had come up to the navy and Coast Guard at that time was from a report from an ocean liner that was in the supposed location of the plane at that specific time claiming to have seen a giant fireball in the sky.

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However, even to date, no part of these supposedly crashed planes has been found, which also sparkles the mysterious aura surrounding the legendary Bermuda Triangle.

British South American Airways Star Tiger

A British South American AirwaysAvro Tudor IV plane nicknamed Star Tiger had taken off from the Azores archipelago to complete the last leg of a flight from London to Bermuda on 30 January 1948.

Post its smooth take-off, it was noted that the plane had endured problems with a heater and a malfunctioning compass. But the plane had continued its smooth functioning without any problem behind a Lancastrian plane that served as a lookout for signs of stormy weather.

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To keep the plane warmer, it flew extremely low at 2,000 feet, thus eliminating any room for wiggle in case a problem arose. The low altitude of the plane also caused it to burn fuel at a much faster pace in comparison to if it had been flying at a more appropriate height.

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The Lancastrian plane landed at the destination without any problems, but the Star Tiger had some major issues with its ground control.

Rescue crews searched without luck, and all 25 passengers and six crew members were never again found, which left the investigators to conclude that “it may be said that no more baffling problem has ever been presented.”

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The recent investigations that have gone into the case have blamed the unreliable design of the plane, the possible gales that could have blown it straight into the sea, and also its decision to fly so low. However, not so much as a life preserver or piece of broken glass has been found in connection to the Star Tiger.

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Stantec

The British South American plane, Lancastrian, went completely missing on August 2, 1947, while finishing its final leg of a connecting flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago.

Investigators and air-traffic control centers were both left mystified, as the last communication received by a Chilean Air Force operator was a very cryptic message which read “STENDEC,” which was long believed to be mistyped.

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Post 50 years of the incident, strange things started to reappear. In the late 1990s, pieces of wreckage began to emerge in the Andes Mountains, and in 2000 body parts from the flight’s passengers were found, which were well-preserved by glacial ice despite all the years. 

A lot of rumors went around the case, ranging from alien abduction to Nazi spies and stolen gold; an in-depth investigation uncovered that inclement weather had caused the crash and determined that the most probable meaning of the strange communication was based on a WWII code, deciphered as “Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing.”

The plane which made Amelia Earhart disappear

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a plane in 1928 and the first woman to fly solo across the pond in 1932. She became a symbol of how brave and bold women should be and proved how high women could go.

However, her story met a tragic and mysterious end in July 1937, when, on a trip to fly around the world, her plane, a twin-engine Lockheed Electra, disappeared near the International Date Line in the central Pacific Ocean.

Although there are a lot of speculations around this incident by many scholars and mystics about the exact circumstances of her disappearance, the highest possibility of her being stranded on an uninhabited island for years is the one that is mostly believed in. Still, nothing is known with absolute certainty about it.