According to the account of the 1947 crash of the airliner Star Dust, the British plane left Buenos Aires for Santiago on 2 August 1947 and vanished over the Andes. Four minutes before its planned landing, the radio operator tapped out a final Morse message ending in one word: "STENDEC." The Chilean operator at Santiago found the transmission "loud and clear" but very fast, did not recognize the word, and heard it repeated twice before contact was lost.
"The fate of the aircraft and its occupants remained unknown for over fifty years," feeding theories of sabotage and even a UFO. Then in 1998 two mountaineers found a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine emerging from the Tupungato Glacier at 15,000 feet. Investigators concluded that the crew, flying blind through the then-poorly understood jet stream, believed they had cleared the mountains and had begun descending into a peak.
STENDEC has never been explained. The simplest suggestion is that it is an anagram of "DESCENT," possibly scrambled by a radio operator suffering from hypoxia.
Previously:
