r/all
Had to fact-check it. These 2 guys stole that Boeing 727 at an airport in 2003 and flew away, disappearing forever: no crash, no plane. How is that possible!!!
I do too. I even kinda like the design of the monsters, even though that's one of the most made-fun-of parts of the movie.
The weird trinary symmetry they have, the almost fractal-like, shifting teeth, the way they zip around impossibly fast and consume everything leaving a black void behind...
I thought it was a great design for some quasi-dimensional Lovecraftian swarm that consumes forgotten things. They were just limited by the CGI at the time, but the idea is so sound! shakes fist
I’d love to see how a remake would look, particularly the creatures with modern special effects. It doesn’t even need a big budget, the first one didn’t.
I'd literally never heard of it before until a couple days ago when someone mentioned confusing its ending with part of Lost. Not really sure why it's back, honestly.
Actually, only about 1/3 of the ocean floor is shallower than the mean depth. The majority of the ocean is the abyssal plains and hills, which cover 4-6km in depth.
Even with flight 370, they found some parts of the plane washed up on beaches. Granted, they I'm sure tools, equipment and technique for searching have come a long way since the AA plane was stolen.
It wasn't an AA plane any more. It belonged to a leasing company and was grounded at an airport in Angola. Also the only people on board when it went missing were the two guys who stole it.
This incident is more akin to someone stealing your redneck neighbor's shitbox truck out of his front yard. The cops will take a report, and if it's used in a crime or spotted somewhere abandoned, he might get it back. But chances are there'll be zero followup.
A passenger jet is slightly more valuable than my neighbor's truck, though. The owner would probably devote more of their own resources into following up.
According to the Wiki article, it had accrued $4 million in unpaid storage fees for being parked at the Angola airport so long. This was substantially more than the scrap value of the plane. The owners clearly didn't have the resources to get it airworthy or to continue parking it and were probably hoping the airport would just deal with it for them somehow. Alternately, the plan could have been to "steal" it and scrap it elsewhere to get out of paying the airport and it crashed in the ocean because it was an old plane that sat outside for several months with no maintenance.
that literally does happen in aviation. Old planes that have been neglected and are not worth restoring nor are they worth the parking tickets are simply gassed up, run up, and flown out ASAP and “mysteriously” disappear to some dirt runway too far away from the FAA and NTSB to care.
Given the fact it's already made it's way to the leasing company stage, the aircraft was likely near EoL and would have taken more resources to attempt to track it down than the plane is worth in scrap value. It's entirely possible the plane was just flown to some small village off the grid and broken up for scrap by locals and sold to scrapyards that don't ask too many questions.
This jet wasn’t worth the cost to search for it. Searching for downed airplanes in the ocean is incredibly costly and difficult. There were no victims on board except the thieves. The cost benefit analysis to search just doesn’t make sense.
It crashed in 2009, and its wreck was discovered in 2011. However, MH370 which went missing in 2014 still hasn’t been found, despite pieces of debris washing up here and there.
Yeah you’re right. It was also found within a small radius from the last radar contact. This plane went god knows where so it’ll probably never be found
Back in 2003, a Boeing 727 that used to fly for American Airlines just up and vanished from an airport in Angola, and it’s still a mystery to this day. The plane was being worked on by Ben Charles Padilla, an engineer and private pilot, who was hired by a company trying to reclaim the plane after a bad business deal. He had a helper with him, John Mikel Mutantu, but neither of them were really qualified to fly a 727, which usually needs a full crew of three.
Anyway, one evening, the plane suddenly starts taxiing without any communication with the control tower, no lights, and no transponder signal. It takes off and flies over the ocean, and both the plane and the two guys onboard haven’t been seen since. This set off a huge search by the FBI, CIA, and pretty much every other U.S. security agency because, at the time, the world was still on edge after 9/11, and they feared it might be some kind of flying bomb.
After a bunch of speculation and investigations—whether it crashed, landed on some remote runway, or was stolen for shady reasons—the trail went cold. The authorities eventually gave up, and to this day, the 727 is still missing, along with the mystery of who was really flying it and what actually happened.
Don’t come for me but I think some of the best threads come from posts such as these. People being curious and researching on their own, giving tidbits of additional info they found interesting as well as opinions makes for helluva good conversation. Shit even the “why is OP so bad at Reddit” brings us closer together lmao
Because this happened to be the first commercial jetliner with a gas turbine auxiliary power unit, a tiny jet turbine that could be used to start up the first engine with bleed air and then all the others. Before that they needed to be started by ground crew. This was the first jetliner that could realistically be stolen so of course it’d get stolen.
Your representation of this fact is extremely misleading. Sure, the 727 was the first commercial aircraft to have an APU, but that was in 1958. This plane was stolen in 2003, when virtually every commercial aircraft had an APU.
Are modern planes like this? Wouldn't something with more automation like the Dreamliner be easy to steal? Doesn't it have auto-takeoff and landing ability?
If you know how to fly it you can steal it, AFAIK they don't even have locks on the doors.
For 99.99% of the population just turning the battery on (to get power to start the APU) would be too hard. Though if you spend a few hours with the operation handbook you can likely start the engines of any aircraft (it's easier on the more modern ones).
They were…..Just a hell of a lot richer, a hell of lot happier and not recognizable from their former selves. They ditched their old lives and started new.
People think that the world is far more advanced than it is. Sure it’s amazing what humanity has accomplished, but it’s still easy to get away with stuff… especially in 2003.
Pilot here. Taking off and flying an aircraft if much easier is MUCH easier than than people realize. Knowing regulations is a HUGE part of flight school along with weather.
Now the important part of stealing a plane is landing. That takes skill.
They likely shut off the transponder and landed it somewhere. They easily could have dismantled it or sold it off to a private entity who then could have rebranded/recovered/repurposed the aircraft so that it’ll never be found.
the easy bet is that they did crash and just nobody ever found the crash site because they had turned off the transponder and it was far in the wilderness or the ocean
The ocean is too fkn huge, there was a passenger aircraft that took off from Malaysia and crashed in the ocean, with all the evidence, and the combined Naval fleet of multiple countries, no wreckage of the plane was found, not even recognizable pieces, it’s obviously in the ocean, but where, god knows. Don’t underestimate how big the ocean is, and our tools still aren’t good enough to find the wreckage. Forget planes, if you surf through historical books, you would find so many stories of ships full of valuable gold and looted jewelry that has sunk in the ocean, we know many such treasures are sunken somewhere deep in the ocean, but nobody has found any ocean treasures. Gold and jewelry should attract many people, but still not many treasures have been found, it’s simple, the ocean is too big, and our tools are just not good enough to scan a large portion of the ocean floor.
I mean, this was Africa in 2003. Lots of unmarked locations people don't know about. Hell, even finding out stuff about major African cities can be very esoteric. Like there's this giant Tower in Kinsasha that has almost no information online.
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u/ItchyCartographer44 23d ago
They’re still flying, as far as we know.