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发帖数: 5697 | 1 Eleven years ago, a shiny silver Boeing 727 airliner took off from Luanda,
Angola, and became one of the few commercial jetliners to vanish and never
be found.
Massive jet airplanes disappear more often in fiction than in real life, but
it does happen. In 1979, a Boeing 707 with six people aboard was lost in
the Pacific Ocean after leaving Tokyo. And dozens of smaller planes have
gone missing and never been located.
The Aviation Safety Network, a database tracking accidents, lists 80 planes
as "missing" since 1948. No trace of the planes or their occupants was ever
found, according to ASN President Harro Ranter. The aircraft range from tiny
one-seat propeller planes to jetliners and a U.S. Coast Guard Lockheed C-
130 Hercules—a four-engine turboprop transport—that crashed off the
California coast in 2009.
The 727 that vanished over Angola is believed to have had only two people
aboard. At dusk on May 25, 2003, an American mechanic for Aerospace Sales &
Leasing Co., the Florida-based lessor that owned the 18-year-old plane,
boarded the jetliner in Luanda, according to press reports at the time. He
was accompanied by a Congolese assistant. Neither was certified to pilot the
plane, which normally required a crew of three.
Without authorization or communication, the plane began taxiing, according
to press reports. Its lights and transponder remained off as it took off and
started to fly over the Atlantic.
The unauthorized departure, less than two years after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, sparked an international search. U.S. diplomats and African
authorities visited airfields across the continent, seeking hints the plane
had landed. U.S. national-security authorities including the Federal Bureau
of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency scoured satellite
images. The plane was never seen again.
"I have no idea" about what happened to the 727, it is "one of those things
we've never understood," said Maury Joseph, president of Aerospace Sales &
Leasing. "It's unheard of for something that large, and nothing to this day
has ever shown up." |
