Planes That Went Missing

 

Some urban legends don't die, they just change clothes. There's a long-held story about a time traveling plane flight. The flight and details change, but the concept remains. Did this (these) flight(s) time travel? 

Here's some of the legends - 

 

Santiago Flight 513: Santiago Flight 513, a Commercial Airliner that takes off in Germany in 1954, and lands in Brazil in 1989 with 92 skeletons on board ― with the dead pilot still at controls. 

Pan Am Flight 914: Disappeared on takeoff in 1955 with 5 crew members and 57 passengers. It was bound from NYC to Miami. But, it landed 37 years later in Caracas. It was said the airport radar did not pick up the plane as it was coming in to land. This has been hailed as an absolute fake story. 

Another legend says a flight leaving Germany to Argentina in 1962 landed 29 years later in Chile.

Although none of these variations of events happened, it did remind of us aerial mysteries that occurred in the past. Here's some examples - 

Flight 19. Five gunmen on bomber planes went on an aerial practice in the Bermuda Triangle region on December 5, 1945. It went missing, never to be seen again. 

Oddly, my father was friends with one of the airmen. He had convinced the man to go on the practice and ask for leave for his parents' anniversary instead of Christmas. I think my father felt a good deal of guilt over that, as my dad had been at Pearl Harbor and lost friends, but survived on the USS Thornton. 

There's also the story of Amelia Earhart's missing plane in 1937. Oddly, once again, my father joined the Navy in 1937, Pacific Asiatic Fleet, and his first mission was the search for Amelia. Even almost 100 years later, we still don't have absolutes. 

Another interesting story that gets our curious buttons going is a private pilot who flew through the Bermuda Triangle region and supposedly met up with an electronic fog that affected his instrumentation. It was said that he flew 100 miles in 3 minutes with this bit of time travel. 

I have to think that there is something odd to the concept of flying hundreds of miles an hour above those on land traveling at 65 miles per hour. That may be simplistic, but I am reminded of Einstein's theory of special relativity - a scientific theory of the relationship between space and time.

Some airliners have gone down and were never found, but given the vast amount of oceans on the planet, that's not impossible to believe.

One of the most famous one was Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.  The Boeing 777 carrying 239 people vanished on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Despite the largest search in aviation history across the southern Indian Ocean, the main body of the aircraft has never been found, though scattered debris washed up on distant African and island coastlines.

A British South American Airlines in 1949 was en route from Bermuda to Jamaica with 20 people on board. It went missing and no trace was found. 

Hundreds of small planes have gone down in the United States and were never found. This says much for the size of vasts forests and lakes. 

Some have delighted in movies about such things like Stephen King's "Langoliers." 

I loved at the end of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" when the alien ship opened up and out came Flight 19 pilots and others who were abducted long ago. 

Where do they go when they go missing? I think we'd all like to believe they landed somewhere - somehow - some time in a place that allowed a runway and disembarking in another world.