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Message: <blockquote data-quote="malakadss" data-source="post: 16400471" data-attributes="member: 179884">The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight  370 is the most bizarre story in aviation history. Or is it? A plane  disappeared in 2003 under even stranger circumstancesNow we live in the digital era. Thousands of satellites roam above the  earth, shooting aerial images directly to our computers. How does a  massive plane with built-in GPS and high-tech instruments meant to track  and telegraph its every move suddenly disappear? It makes no sense. The  story of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 resembles something closer to  fictionBut it’s not the first time a modern plane—with GPS and all the other  trappings of 21st-century aviation—has disappeared. Before Flight 370,  there was just one other jet of this size to have disappeared in modern  aviation history: the Boeing 844AA.    <a href="http://www.vocativ.com/world/malaysia/malaysia-air-conspiracy-theory-roundup/" target="_blank"> Related Story: Malaysia Air Conspiracy Theory Roundup</a>      In 2003, on a dusty airstrip in Luanda, Angola, two airplane  mechanics boarded a Boeing 727. The midsize three-engine jet, tail  number 844AA, had been temporarily decommissioned for service repairs.  The workers—American flight engineer Ben Charles Padilla and his  Congolese helper, John Mikel Mutantu—were there to get the plane ready  for its next flight. According to <a href="http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-727-that-vanished-2371187/?all" target="_blank">the air traffic controller</a> on  duty at the time, the 153-foot plane began taxiing towards the runway,  its engines revving. Neither Padilla nor Mutantu had a pilot’s license,  and they certainly did not have clearance to be in the cockpit, let  alone fly the plane. The plane’s transponders were turned off. Neither  of the mechanics returned calls from the flight’s air traffic  controllers.       <a href="http://media.vocativ.com/photos/2014/03/Giant-Plane-Vansished_022787732296.jpg" target="_blank"> <img src="http://media.vocativ.com/photos/2014/03/Giant-Plane-Vansished_021058541395.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />    </a> The Boeing 727, tail number 844A is shown at Chicago O'Hare airport in this undated picture.    Minutes before sunset, with the plane’s headlights turned  off, Padilla and Mutantu maneuvered the plane onto the runway and took  off. Air traffic controllers watched as the plane soared above them,  heading southwest towards the Atlantic Ocean. Ten years later, the  Boeing 844AA still remains an unsolved mystery: It has never been found,  and Padilla and Mutantu were never heard from again. For the past week and a half, the world has watched in awe as  Malaysian Airlines flight 370, a 242-foot plane, seemingly vanished  somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Conspiracy theories abound: Was the  plane hijacked? Was the government involved? <a href="http://www.vocativ.com/world/malaysia/malaysia-air-conspiracy-theory-roundup/" target="_blank">Was it something otherworldly?</a> Most importantly: How is it possible that investigators have not found it yet? Many in media were quick to pronounce the missing Malaysian jet the strangest event in aviation history. Slate <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/03/malaysia_airways_flight_370_disappearance_is_unlike_anything_in_aviation.html" target="_blank">called it</a> “unlike anything we’ve known before.” Perhaps it is now.    <a href="http://www.vocativ.com/world/china/china-al-qaedas-cross-hairs/" target="_blank"> Related Story: Is China in Al Qaeda’s Crosshairs?</a>      But in 2010, Air & Space magazine sent a reporter, Tim Wright, <a href="http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-727-that-vanished-2371187/?all" target="_blank">on a quest</a>  to find out what happened to the missing Boeing 844AA. The story  explains how several U.S. government agencies—from FBI, the CIA, the  U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security, CENTCOM—all pitched in  to find the plane. This was, after all, two years after 9/11, and as Air  & Space notes in the story, the “freakish departure triggered a  frantic search by U.S. security organizations for what intelligence  sources said could have been a flying bomb.” Days then weeks passed. Some speculated that neither Padilla nor Mutantu had flown the plane  at all; one theory was that they were ambushed from within the plane by  terrorists, who had taken the plane to stash it somewhere. Others  guessed it was taken to a remote airplane hangar somewhere in Africa to  be stripped and sold for parts. Some believe it crashed in the ocean  soon after takeoff. Someone else thinks the government (Angolan?  American?) shot it down. Some think it went to Tanzania. From Wright’s  story:One crew member from the fuel delivery operation thinks  the Angolan air force shot it down with a missile. A Luandan pilot says  the word there is that the aircraft went north and vanished near  Kinshasa, Congo. One of Ben Padilla’s friends says the airplane was  disassembled for parts in Bujumbura, Burundi, on Tanzania’s western  border. The reporter assigned to the story for Air & Space never really  found an answer. ”Picking through the fragments of 844AA’s history, I  found a story of broken deals, disappointments, and betrayals, but no  real clues to the aircraft’s destination that day in 2003,” he wrote.  “We may never know for sure where it went. It is the largest aircraft  ever to have disappeared without a trace.” Now it is the second-largest.Source : <a href="http://www.vocativ.com/tech/machines/isnt-first-time-giant-plane-gps-tracking-vanished/?utm_campaign=mar1&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=outbrain" target="_blank">http://www.vocativ.com/tech/machines/isnt-first-time-giant-plane-gps-tracking-vanished/?utm_campaign=mar1&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=outbrain</a></blockquote>

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