<i></i> <i></i> <i></i> 0<p>It is not uncommon to come across plane crashes in this day and age, especially when air travel is so widespread and versatile. With the onset of this air travel, we were able to get from point A to point B at stellar speed and this shaped our entire life around this accessibility which changed the way we looked at our jobs, family, and travel.</p> <p>Whether or not this is a feasible mode of travel remains a great debate; especially when there exist countless accounts of planes gone missing with little or no evidence which raises the cause of concern owing to the lack of substantial evidence to the reasoning of these crashes.</p> <p>Airplanes normally hold a black box in their cache of the tail to record the flight data that can ascertain the cause of airplane failure and thus crashes. But that is the unbecoming sad reality of airplane disappearances; the fact that irrecoverable black boxes simply mean lost flight data that can never let us know the causes for the crashes and simple leaves these disappearances as unsolved Sherlock-esque mysteries never to be solved.</p> <p>So following the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, we are only left to stand and ponder at the sad history of the string of flights that strangely went missing. With the iconic, mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart’s ill-fated plane, through the armada of the dual World War flights that never met the runway again, we can note that due to a variety of reasons these airplanes were never found. So whether it was espionage, sabotage or the pure malevolence of nature, it is yet to be seen; but let’s venture into this world of air flight and adjudge the 19 most mysterious flight disappearances in this history of tragic disappearances. Read on!</p> <h2>#19 Frederick Valentich</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1069.jpeg"/>wikipedia <p>In 1978, Frederick Valentich disappeared in his Cessna 182L, while his last reportings were being tailed by an unidentified flying object (UFO). When he was asked about the UFO, his last claim was that it isn’t an aircraft. Spooky!</p> <h2>#18 Amelia Earhart</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1070.jpeg"/>realclearlife <p>Amelia Earhart was famed as the first female pilot to iconically cross the Atlantic Ocean as well as the first pilot to fly solo across the pond. Amelia Earhart proved to women across the world of the heights women could achieve if they applied themselves. However, her ill-fated flight met a sad and tragic end in July 1937 when, on a circumnavigation trip around the world, her airplane which was a twin-engine Lockheed Electra, vanished close to the International Date Line, near the center of the Pacific Ocean. Though there exists a considerable deal of speculation by scholars and experts about the exact circumstances and the fallout of her disappearance, nothing was ever substantially settled. Possibilities, such as her being stranded on an uninhabited island till her death, or defecting to another country are some of the hot sellers, but again nothing could ever be proven.</p> <h2>#17 Flying Tiger Flight 739</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1071.jpeg"/>wikimedia <p>In the middle of the March of 1962, the preliminary stages of the Vietnam War were in full swing, and the USAF Tiger Flight 739 had under mysterious circumstances vanished over the infamous and pitch-black deep Mariana Trench located in the Pacific Ocean during its journey from Guam to the Philippines. After an estimated hour from the plane’s final communication to the control tower, the crew of a Standard Oil tanker-ship in the locality reported having witnessed a bright and illustrated explosion high in the sky, which investigators claim to have belonged to the plane. Any air-traffic control centers collected no distress calls of May-day in the area which meant immense difficulties for investigators to correctly identify the exact circumstances that met the ill-fated flight and its crew. After a very exhaustive search party that comprised of 1,300 people, 48 aircraft, and eight surface vessels that combined to create a thorough search covering roughly 144,000 square miles—which sadly proved entirely unsuccessful in its cause causing a severe rumor mill to run rampant throughout the United States as to what had happened.</p> <h2>#16 STENDEC</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1072.jpeg"/>flywiththestars <p>The British South American Airways airline went MIA on the second of August, 1947 when it was finishing its last leg of a connecting flight to Santiago from Buenos Aires. The investigators and air-traffic control centers were intrigued, for the final communicative message received by a Chilean Air Force operator was very cryptic. “STENDEC” is all that the pilots communicated; which was believed to have been a mistyped message in principal. However, around 50 years later in the late 90s, pieces of the fuselage wreckage were found in the Andes Mountains, and ten years later, various body parts of the flight’s passengers were found by mountaineers, that were well-preserved by the glacial ice. Despite the gossipy, prospective rumors, which ranged from alien abduction to Nazi espionage and stolen gold bullion, an in-depth investigation uncovered important findings that proved otherwise. They found that malicious weather had caused the unfortunate crash and determined that possible meaning of this weird message was that is was based on a WW2 jargon that deciphered as “Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing.” Go figure.</p> <h2>#15 Flight 19, Bermuda Triangle</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1073.jpeg"/>Wikimedia Commons <p>This is arguably one of the most disputed plane disappearances ever. Taken place in early December 1945, it resulted in not one but five disappearances, all of which have yet to be recovered to this day. On the day of disappearance five Avenger torpedo bombers, took off from their home base in Ft. Lauderdale in Florida, for bombing practice in what has since become dubbed the Bermuda Triangle. After experiencing problems with navigation, all five planes lost contact with the ground station. However, the ground station still managed to stay in contact with the pilots of the planes. The pilots were so disoriented with regards to their locations that it was decided that once the first plane dropped substantially in fuel, all five planes were going to ditch to the sea. An expansive rescue mission was launched immediately by the Coast Guard that covered a staggering 700,000 square kilometers over the next five days. During this time, another plane carrying 13 passengers mysteriously disappeared. To this date, no debris of the six missing planes or their passengers has ever been unearthed.</p> <h2>#14 Glenn Miller over the English Channel</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1074.jpeg"/>Wikipedia <p>Glenn Miller had already established himself in the world as one of the greatest big-band leaders and a true innovator of the swing genre. However, when a plane that he was never seen again after its takeoff, his became a household name synonymous to an American legend. No apparent conclusion can be drawn for the plane’s mysterious disappearance; however, the official report regarding the missing aircraft states that the plane probably crashed into the substantial English Channel as a consequence of iced-over wings or other technical complications.</p> <h2>#13 British South American Airways Star Tiger</h2> <h2></h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1075.jpeg"/>wikimedia <p>A British South American Airways plane, called the Star Tiger, took off from Azores archipelago to complete the ending circuit of a flight going from London to Bermuda. Before takeoff, it came to the attention of officials that the plane in question had encountered problems with a heating system, and also had a malfunctioning compass. However, the plane was deemed fit enough to continue as per schedule, behind a Lancastrian plane that worked as a lookout for signs of bad weather. On account of the heating issues, the plane was flown low at 2,000 feet, in warmer weather, leaving zero room for error. When the Lancastrian plane landed, it was not followed by the Star Tiger, causing alarm amongst the ground control. None of the passengers, crew or any part of the plane have been recovered since the incident.</p> <h2>#12 British South American Airways <em>Star Ariel</em></h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1076.jpeg"/>how2becool <p>Another British South American Airways plane, traveling from Bermuda to Jamaica on January 17, 1949, vanished completely from the face of this Earth. An hour after its take off, the Star Ariel made regular contact, relaying its current location to the ground station. However, shortly after that, the aircraft ceased to exist at an altitude of 18,000 feet. Experts haven’t exactly been able to come up with a plausible theory as to what might have happened to the plane, but most of them attribute the plane’s disappearance to technical faults that overwhelmed the crew. Regardless of what the explanation is, no debris of the plane or passengers has been found, and all 20 passengers were reported missing and later presumed dead.</p> <h2>#11 Flight 571: The Andes disaster</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1077.jpeg"/>peopledotcom <p>A Uruguayan Air Force plane chartered to carry 45 passengers and crew that included the Union Rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay; crashed into the Andes under malicious weather. 12 died straight away in the crash, with many casualties in the days after, with the rest resorting to cannibalism. The 1993 film Alive captures the mystery around this crash.</p> <h2>#10 EgyptAir flight 990</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1078.jpeg"/>wikimedia <p>Bound for Cairo from JFK airport in 1999, the Boeing 767 crashed into the Atlantic killing all 217 on board. The pilot el-Batouty was incriminated in the flight and thus his suicidal motive was blamed for the crash. Yet no motive was ever concretely determined.</p> <h2>#9 Air France flight 447</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1079.jpeg"/>Wikimedia <p>The Airbus A330 carrying 288 passengers from Rio to Paris plunged into the Atlantic in 2009 and remained a mystery indefinitely due to the unknown nature of the crash and despite the blackbox being recovered, the case was never solved.</p> <p> </p> <h2>#8 Transatlantic C-124 Flight</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1080.jpeg"/>Wikipedia <p>Another mysterious case is that of the doomed C-124 flight that ditched itself into the Atlantic after a fire in the cargo hold. A B-29 found the ditching successful with the crew and passengers outside in rafts but when rescuers returned a while later, all that was ever found was a charred piece of plywood and a briefcase.</p> <h2>#7 Flying Tiger Flight 739</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1081.jpeg"/>Goliath <p>A chartered plane carrying 96 US and South Vietnamese sevicemen to Saigon disappeared over the Philippines as Liberian tanker shipmates noted a bright light in the sky around the same time. A true mystery indeed.</p> <h2>#6 Malaysian Airlines flight MH370</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1082.jpeg"/>BBC <p>This iconic mystery is the first of two aircraft crashes suffered by Malaysian Airlines, and more grave so because the wreckage was never found. Crashing somewhere over the South China Sea, there was an international effort to recover the plane but it never yielded success.</p> <h2>#5 Antonov An-32 Indian Air Force</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1083.jpeg"/>Wikipedia <p>In 2016, a twin engined Antonov belonging to the IAF disappeared over the Bay of Bengal causing the largest search in Indian aviation history but yielded no fruit nonetheless. All 29 on board were thus presumed dead.</p> <h2>#4 N844AA theft</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1084.jpeg"/>Historicmysteries <p>In 2003, an American pilot and a mechanist who were not certified a fly planes stole a Boeing 727 from Angola’s Quatro de Fevereiro airport and despite worldwide investigations by the CIA and FBI, the plane and the thieves were never found again.</p> <h2>#3 Helios flight 522</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1085.jpeg"/>Wikimedia <p>In 2005, after the Helios flight veered slightly off course and the 19 communication attempts failed to yield a reply, two F-16s were sent to intercept the rogue aircraft; and the subsequently found that everyone on board was already dead and dangling oxygen masks meant suffocation was to blame. The 117 passengers and crew were already dead by the time the plane crashed into the hillside.</p> <h2>#2 B47 Stratojet</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1086.jpeg"/>Wikimedia <p>In 1956, a nuclear bomber and its two nuclear weapon cores were lost in the Mediterranean and were never found. Thus the multi million dollar plane and its contents including crew were never recovered.</p> <h2>#1 Aer Lingus Flight 712</h2> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1087.jpeg"/>Wikipedia <p>Taken down by mysterious circumstances, many experts suggested a rogue British missile was to blame for this crash. All 61 people on board died on this flight which had a doomed crash that was never solved.</p> <i></i>