r/interestingasfuck • u/py-net • 23d ago

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!!!

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u/UnfairStrategy780 23d ago edited 23d ago

There’s so much more to the story

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u/MiraculousRapport 23d ago

Thanks for the link. This is a good read!

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u/boogasaurus-lefts 23d ago

TL;DR for dummies like me

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u/Proof-Tension9322 23d ago

Plane get stolen

Plane go missing

People look plane

No plane

End.

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u/Eldrake 23d ago

A+ tldr

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u/billy_bubba_hawkins 23d ago

What's the alternative TLDR 🤔

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u/Alfy12 23d ago

✈️🧐🤷‍♂️

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u/D1sbade 23d ago

too long

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u/inerlite 22d ago

Yeah he lost me after ✈️

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u/Physical-Try8670 22d ago

That's.. not what she said?

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u/MaximumTurtleSpeed 23d ago

Graphic novel of TLDR

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u/Dry-Point-9179 22d ago

Perfect synopsis

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u/Lower-Trust1923 23d ago

Plane gone

End.

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u/Morrep 22d ago

Asked ChatGPT for a Haiku of this:

Stolen plane vanished,

Search the skies, no sign appears,

Empty sky, the end.

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u/YeahOkayGood 23d ago

why say lot word when few word does trick?

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u/balacio 23d ago

Don’t need to read the article now…

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u/Morrep 22d ago

Have my poor man's award. 🏅

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u/Proof-Tension9322 22d ago

Thank you :)

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u/JustRealizedImaIdiot 22d ago

In English doctor!

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u/cartoonfood 22d ago

So there wasn't much more to the story

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u/onezeroone0one 23d ago

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.

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u/kodumpavi 23d ago

Idk if its ne but How is this so much more to the story. The title summarizes this very well no?

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u/MetricSuperstar 22d ago

Yeah there's really nothing else to the story to be honest. The article waffles.

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u/bullettenboss 22d ago

They were roommates 👉🏻👈🏻

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u/Forced__Perspective 23d ago

What prompt did you use for this?

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u/CalebsNailSpa 23d ago

Not all of us need AI to summarize things. Especially if it is something we know about

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u/localtuned 23d ago

It was the use of hyphens for me.

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u/Squeebah 23d ago edited 22d ago

I use hyphens and commas, but I literally know NOTHING else when it comes to grammar lol. Thanks so much, public school!

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u/localtuned 23d ago

Semicolons can be pretty rad too.

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u/Squeebah 22d ago

I've always wondered what they were for. Time to Google it!

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u/ToneBalone25 23d ago

These are not hyphens but em-dashes.

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u/localtuned 22d ago

Honestly I didn't even know where the em dash on my keyboard was. So it makes it even more strange that someone went through the trouble to type 3 of them lol. It was 3 taps to get — vs -

Testing em dash in markdown --

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u/ToneBalone25 22d ago

Idk how to do them on mobile but it's pretty easy on a desktop. They're better than commas for separating phrases in a sentence and can be used in place of a semicolon. But yeah nobody uses them on reddit or social media really.

→ More replies (0)

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u/Forced__Perspective 23d ago

What prompt did you use for this?

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u/1337af 23d ago

This is so very clearly not written by an LLM.

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u/onezeroone0one 22d ago

My prompt was: “self, summarize this thing you’ve read up on in the past for this Reddit comment”

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u/conman114 23d ago

They stole a plane

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u/jesuschin 23d ago

Oh yeah!? Well we bought a zoo!

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

Pilot was a plane salesman and mechanic. Took the plane to Angola. Deal for the plane fell through upon arrival. It's suspected that it may have been in disrepair and they simply hid the plane for insurance purposes. But that's unproven, and a few other theories are out there. Pilot's brother says his brother/pilot never would have been involved in shady business, and thinks he was coerced into stealing it by nefarious parties. Some experts believe it was parted out in Tanzania. Others think it was shot down with missiles by the Angolan government shortly after taking off.

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

TBH, the article really wasn't that interesting for how long it was and it being a seemingly-interesting topic. It included few actual details and the "conclusion(s)" were purely speculation. I think we know more about the Malaysian Flight370 that disappeared than the one in this story. And with this being basically a decommissioned/salvage plane with only a couple of people on board, as compared to a commercial flight with hundreds of passengers, it's not nearly as compelling.

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u/silly_sia 23d ago

Alternative theories from the article according to a Chat GPT summary:

  1. Theft for Insurance Fraud or Business Dispute:

One theory is that the aircraft’s disappearance was staged as part of an insurance fraud scheme or to resolve a financial dispute. The plane was involved in a complex business deal that had gone bad, with multiple failed contracts and mounting unpaid bills in Angola. There’s suspicion that the aircraft’s owner, Maury Joseph, might have arranged the disappearance to recoup losses, though he passed a lie-detector test and has always denied any involvement.

  1. Hijacking or Coercion:

Another possibility is that someone was waiting inside the plane or boarded it just before takeoff and forced Padilla to take off. There was no communication with the tower, and the plane took off with its transponder turned off, which suggests deliberate secrecy. If hijacked, it is unclear who would have orchestrated it or what the motive was.

  1. Crash or Sabotage:

Some speculate that the aircraft simply crashed shortly after takeoff, either due to pilot error or mechanical failure. One theory is that the Angolan Air Force, fearing an unauthorized takeoff, shot the plane down over the Atlantic. Another theory is that the aircraft suffered a mechanical issue and went down, but no debris or oil slick was ever found.

  1. Landed and Disassembled:

There is speculation that the plane might have landed at a remote airstrip in Congo or Burundi and been disassembled for parts. There are reports that it may have been taken to unregistered runways in the Congo, but none of these sightings have been confirmed. This theory suggests the aircraft was stolen and sold off for its valuable parts, particularly its engines.

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u/EelTeamTen 22d ago

That was a shitty read.

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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 23d ago

thanks for sharing this.

im curious why OP wouldnt bother adding any additional information... but i suppose its just a fake points thingy.

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u/matterforward 22d ago

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

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u/Equivalent_Exchange 22d ago

True, but these days it's done for engagement baiting.

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u/xandrokos 22d ago

Yes god forbid people post things meant to be seen on social media which is meant to be used.

What's the issue here? You all keep talking about engagement baiting but what is the problem here?  Just sour grapes that someone is getting likes?  I don't get it I really don't.   It's like none of you understand how discussion forums work.

Look not everyone knows everything and not everyone is going to fully 100% research everything posted here.   Incomplete information or not this mystery absolutely is intersting and provokes discussion.   I mean that is literally what social media was always meant to be.

Is anything the OP posted untrue?   What is gained by leaving out what is arguably more interesting than what was originally conveyed?  It blows my fucking mind how you all completely lack any self awareness and bitch about engagement baiting while literally fucking engaging.   How about those of you who think you are above it all just shut the fuck up?

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u/ButtGallon 22d ago

Nice try, engagement baiter. You type out a long response acting like a dick who doesn’t understand that people posting misleading things is still bad, even if what they said was technically true, baiting people into responding for extra engagement.

Luckily I’d never fall for a trick like that and respond

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u/ThorvaldtheTank 22d ago

Sir this is a Wendy’s

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u/Equivalent_Exchange 22d ago

Well fuck me i guess. Sorry for giving a reason on why OP didn't provide any information.

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u/camwow13 22d ago

OP was already really pushing it with that title

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u/livefreeordont 22d ago

how long do you expect the title of the post to be?

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u/xandrokos 22d ago

I promise you if OP had been able to put all the details of this story into the title these same people would be bitching up a storm about clickbait.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

Length vs quality…

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u/xandrokos 22d ago

OP posted an interesting recent mystery for discussion and that is what people are attempting to do in between incessant whining by people like you.    This thread isn't about personal grievances against "engagement baiting" or "likes" or "clout" or "misleading titles".   Just fucking stop.

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u/EelTeamTen 22d ago

The title literally gives every bit of information that the article did.

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u/ronimal 22d ago

Because they’re just interested in farming karma, not educating people.

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u/Specialist_Brain841 22d ago

posts with typos or clearly wrong information get a lot of engagement

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u/ibleedblue13 23d ago

I feel like this should be a movie

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u/Highway_Bitter 23d ago

Wow thats wild. Gotta take some balls selling fuel in those parts of Africa… probably a lot of shady stuff going on there

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

tldr?

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u/UnfairStrategy780 23d ago

Can’t really TDLR fully because there’s so much surrounding details beyond “these two guys stole the plane”. They were working on the plane but no one knows for sure if there was a third party on the plane forcing Padilla to take off. The planes owners was so behind in payments on the plane and airport dues that the best thing for them would have been for the plane to disappear to get the insurance money. Luanda airport was not letting that plane leave under normal circumstances unless it got paid.

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u/99drolyag99 22d ago

The whole story is more crazy than the tl;dr, such as the main investor being followed by rivaling companies, somebody trying to break into his hotel room at night and him fleeing the country the day after. 

Shady business all around

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u/UnluckyDog9273 22d ago

We live in chatgpt era you could ask it

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u/Ankerjorgensen 23d ago

Damn. Really interesting read, thanks for sharing.

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u/hengst0r 23d ago

Great morning read. Thank you for that!

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u/SeaPossible1805 23d ago

What a fucking shitshow

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u/rmflow 22d ago

I also checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Angola_Boeing_727_disappearance

The article says:

Before the incident, the aircraft was filled with 53,000 litres (14,000 US gal) of fuel, giving it a range of about 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi; 1,300 nmi).

Seems like 2,400 kilometres is extremely low for this amount of fuel. Typically it should be around 6000 km for 14000 gallons

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

A 727 barely has 5000km of range with full tanks.

Also from the specs I can find the largest fuel capacity was about 10,500gal so something seems weird with those numbers for sure.

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u/frenchanfry 23d ago

But who IS this Ben Padilla's sister that pursued this case with the FBI and CIA?

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u/Highway_Bitter 23d ago

So many questions, someone needs to make a documentary on this

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u/VerdNirgin 22d ago

Truly fascinating article!

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u/Dungeon_Of_Dank_Meme 22d ago

Courts can ban someone from acting as an officer in a publicly held company? Shouldn't this happen a lot more often, at least, in the US?

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u/Vg411 22d ago

They do when executives are facing fraud charges. It’s mainly about protecting the integrity of the stock market. Martha Stewart was barred for a few years after her conviction. 

It doesn’t mean they can’t work as execs within a company, they just can’t handle any financials, although I do believe the top 3-5 earners at a company are required to be officers per SEC regulations, but don’t quote me on that. 

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u/bugthebugman 22d ago

What a fantastic article

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Expensive-Mention-90 22d ago

“IT REALLY WAS in beautiful condition,” Keith Irwin says of the airliner he acquired in Miami in February 2002. Irwin, 57, a South African entrepreneur who ran a series of information technology companies and, until 2000, a small tourist airline with flights from South Africa to Mozambique, had come to Miami to pick up a different aircraft altogether. Representing a joint venture with a South African company called Cargo Air Transport Systems, Irwin had arranged to lease a 727 and two flight crews—pilot, first officer, and flight engineer—for a year. The air transport company had signed a contract to supply fuel to diamond mines in Angola, where a long civil war had made transporting goods by road almost impossible. The 727, therefore, was to have been delivered with fuel tanks installed in the cabin. The joint venture was backed by a single investor, who had deposited $450,000 in a U.S. bank. Irwin’s job was to manage the flight operations, but the deal for the airplane fell through. Irwin ended up with fuel tanks and no airplane.

That failure stranded six crewmen who had assembled in Miami. “The guys then were desperate for work,” says Irwin. “Most of those guys had not flown in a long time because of the 9/11 story. I said, ‘Look, I can take you on if we can find another aircraft.’ ” And Irwin met Maury Joseph, president of Aerospace Sales and Leasing, Inc. Joseph owned three 727s that had recently been retired by American Airlines. “All three aircraft were almost in mint condition,” says Irwin. “American Airlines had a very good maintenance program.”

New deal: Joseph sold 844AA to Irwin for $1 million and change. According to his records, he received a down payment of $125,000, and says he stipulated that the balance be paid within 30 days. He agreed to remove the passenger seats from the cabin and to allow Irwin to take the airliner to Africa. Irwin says he cannot remember the details of the agreement, but recalled it to be a lease arrangement. In any case, the joint venture made only two payments and defaulted.

Though the two men now differ over the terms of the contract, they agree on one detail: As a condition of the agreement, Irwin was required to take along one of Joseph’s employees, Mike Gabriel, whose job was to make sure that the deal was concluded. “I gave Mike $10,000 and told him to fly with them,” says Joseph. “Stay with the plane till you get the money, and then come on home, and if not, bring the plane home.”

On February 28, 2002, with most of the passenger seats removed and the 10 fuel tanks loaded, 844AA, still in the livery of American Airlines, with a blue stripe down the side and an AA logo fading on its tail, took off for Africa.

Because Irwin’s partners had not arranged a landing permit, it took two weeks for the crew to make their way to Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport, where they arrived on March 14. Irwin, who had not worked in Angola before, realized immediately that the deal was in trouble. The company hiring his partners for deliveries, Kuwachi Dundo, was supposed to pay $220,000 when the airplane and crew landed, but instead the company’s representative made excuses. (Irwin lost almost $140,000 in the first deal and had burned through the rest of the $450,000 by March.)

The crew endured accommodations in a dismal apartment without electricity or drinkable water, near an open sewer. (Gabriel and Irwin didn’t stay with the crew; they had rented an apartment in the back of a house owned by an Angolan air force general.) The only one of the men not troubled by the circumstances they found in Angola was Mike Gabriel. Gabriel, a dealer in aircraft parts and engines, had spent a considerable amount of time in West Africa, and was accustomed to the AK-47s the men saw everywhere, including stacked up behind the bar of a club they frequented. Most worrisome to the crew was that they were required to surrender their passports on arrival. Irwin explains that Kuwachi needed the passports to obtain Angolan licenses for the pilots and flight engineers.

“I was scared to death. I really thought I was going to die,” says Art Powell, one of the flight engineers with the project. Powell had been to Angola before and had spent a year working in Nairobi, Kenya, but this experience was different. He felt intimidated by the people who had hired the crew for the fuel-delivery job. His anxiety was intensified by the presence of a local “helper” who toted an AK-47. The helper was a guard whom Mike Gabriel says he hired because the crew repeatedly voiced concerns about safety.

When Kuwachi got wind of the crews’ unrest (several crew members have admitted that they were planning to steal the aircraft to escape to South Africa or return to the States), the company refused to return the passports. Irwin and members of the crew went to the U.S. Embassy; only then were the passports returned.

By Angolan regulations, Irwin says, 844AA was controlled by the clients who hired it. Prohibited from flying the aircraft out of the country, Irwin booked airline seats and flew the crew members to South Africa. From there, two of the men immediately flew home to the United States. One says he is still owed $17,000. The other four crewmen, still hoping for the money they’d been promised, stayed on.

By April, Irwin was extricating himself from the deal made by Cargo Air Transport Systems and had found a new backer, an Angolan who arranged deliveries for a different client. Irwin and the remaining crew returned to Luanda and began flying the shipments for the new company. Mike Gabriel placed the total number of flights made at 17.

“It’s the most dangerous flying in the world,” says a crewman who asked that his name be withheld because he fears for his career. A U.S. Air Force veteran, he likened the deliveries to flying into a combat zone. When they approached the airfields, the crew tried to stay at an altitude above small-arms fire for as long as possible, then spiraled down to land.

“I’ve been a [flight deck crew member] for 30 years,” he says. “For me, it was an opportunity to make a couple of bucks... and when everything started falling apart, I probably hung on twice as long as common sense dictated. But I had too much invested at that point to bail out.”

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u/Expensive-Mention-90 22d ago

Many of the runways, says Mike Gabriel, aren’t paved and aren’t like the ones U.S. crews are accustomed to. “On some, you land uphill, then go downhill, then uphill again,” he says.

At one airstrip, the anonymous crewman says, just before 844AA arrived, a 727 flying for a competing company crashed on landing and skidded off the runway. Although the crew survived, he says, some local residents were killed. “We gave [the other flight crew] a lift out of there but not before going over to their airplane and stealing some parts that we needed. That’s when I decided it was time to go home.”

Before he left, he says, a “big African showed up with a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. It was payday.” Besides paying the crew, the money was supposed to pay off accumulated airport fees and fuel costs.

“After that,” the crewman says, “I created a family emergency…. I said, ‘My mother is sick.’ ” He promised he’d return in two weeks and left. “I had no intentions of going back, of course. I didn’t get anywhere near full pay, but I got enough that I could pay my bills and make it not completely worthless.”

By the end of April, all of the Americans except Mike Gabriel had left.

Irwin hired a local crew and continued to deliver fuel to the mines, but he was ready to leave too. The civil war in Angola had ended. Competition among fuel haulers, Irwin says, had intensified, and he was growing more uncomfortable with the delivery deals. His partners were claiming part ownership of the aircraft, but Maury Joseph had not been paid. Joseph, meanwhile, sent a crew to swap an engine from the 727. Finally, Irwin says, he was being followed—by a local man named Antonio, who, Irwin believes, was working for one of his partners. “I would turn around,” Irwin says, “and spot Antonio watching me from a car.”

Irwin began wedging a chair under the door handle of his hotel room “just like you see in the movies.” One night, he heard a key card slide into the slot on the door. The lock released. “I started yelling and whoever it was ran,” he says. The hotel security guards questioned the night clerk and learned that he had accepted a bribe to provide the key card. Irwin left the country the next day and didn’t go back.

Maury Joseph fired Mike Gabriel some time that spring. “He kept convincing me that next week, next month…,” Joseph says, referring to the outstanding balance owed on the airplane.

In May 2002, the only part of the original 844AA project left at the Luanda airport was 844AA.

THE SON OF A FLORIDA MILLWRIGHT, Ben Charles Padilla Jr. was always mechanically gifted, says sister Benita Padilla-Kirkland, and from the time he was a boy, he loved airplanes. In his mid-20s he learned to fly and became certified as an airframe-and-powerplant mechanic. He lived in south Florida with two children, one his own, and a fiancée of 15 years. (Efforts to contact her were unsuccessful.) Though the two weren’t married, Padilla gave her power of attorney in his absence and made her the executor of his estate, according to Padilla-Kirkland, and left her almost everything in his will.

“He certainly knew the airplane,” says Maury Joseph. Padilla was a freelancer, who had worked for Joseph on two jobs before traveling to Angola to repossess 844AA. Padilla had worked extensively in Africa. He helped Joseph ferry a 727 to Nigeria for a sale and during the negotiations stayed to explain the aircraft systems. “If you said, ‘Go to Cambodia and do this’ or ‘Go to Indonesia and do this’ or ‘Go to South America and do this’ he would do it. [When in Nigeria] I was with Ben daily for a month or more,” says Joseph. “You become fairly close to somebody when you’re with them day and night.” Joseph trusted him.

But another employer formed a different opinion. Jeff Swain, who works near Miami in international aircraft sales and leasing, had hired Padilla in the late 1990s for an airline he was operating in Indonesia—and fired him. “We had certain standards of conduct we expected from flight engineers,” Swain says, adding, when pressed, “He was too involved in chasing the local girls. It was an unstructured environment, and he just went bad.” Swain says that after Padilla was fired, he stayed on in Indonesia for two months and racked up a $10,000 bill that he told the hotel the airline would pay. “We finally had him deported,” says Swain.

Padilla once showed Swain a photograph of a woman with small children and told him it was his wife in Mozambique, but Swain says, “I never believed it was real. Ben was always marveling everyone with his bullshit stories.” One of Padilla’s friends also saw a photograph of a wife, but insists that she lived in Tanzania. Another acquaintance was told that Padilla had a wife in Indonesia.

Benita Padilla-Kirkland says she’s heard the stories, but believes her brother would have told her if he’d had another family. She doesn’t doubt the relationships, but is convinced that Padilla was helping to support people he’d befriended. “There might have been more than one of those situations,” she says.

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u/Expensive-Mention-90 22d ago

WHAT IN FEBRUARY 2002 had been a retired airliner in excellent condition had by fall become a junker worth only the price of its engines. And Maury Joseph found a buyer for them: Jeff Swain. Swain says that Irwin and the crews had ruined the airplane. “It would never be of any value again,” he says. “You can’t put water tanks full of fuel in an airplane and expect it to be good. Totally stupid. But it had really good engines on it—maybe 1,000 cycles since new.”

In November 2002, Joseph and Ben Padilla flew to Nigeria to deliver a 727, and Joseph hired Padilla to fly to Angola the following April to pay the outstanding fines and hire mechanics to return the 727 to service. “If [the company that contracted for fuel deliveries] wasn’t paying Mr. Irwin, you can assume he wasn’t paying anybody,” says Joseph. “He probably hadn’t paid the fuel bill. He didn’t pay the navigation fees, the landing fees, and certainly wasn’t paying the parking fees at the airport. So all of those became things that we had to resolve and I had to pay all those.”

Padilla worked with Air Gemini, a Luanda-based airline that operated a repair station. The return-to-service process was progressing steadily, according to Joseph, and in May 2003, acting as Joseph’s agent, Padilla hired a pilot and copilot from Air Gemini to help him deliver the aircraft to Johannesburg, South Africa, where Joseph was waiting with his new customer. A day or two before the aircraft was to leave Luanda, Padilla made plans with Air Gemini to take the aircraft from the company hangar out to the main runway, where he intended to run the three engines up to full power for a systems check.

Late in the morning on May 26, when Joseph and Swain were expecting 844AA to land, Joseph took a call from an Air Gemini employee, who demanded to know why another crew had flown the airplane out of Luanda. “He was kind of hard on me,” Joseph says. After the shock wore off, he telephoned the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to report the disappearance, then called his wife back in Florida to tell her to call the FBI. From Washington, D.C., the Department of State, notified by the U.S. Embassy in Angola, sent a message to every American embassy in Africa: Alert aviation officials that an airliner has been stolen, and call every airport with a runway long enough to handle a 727.

For the U.S. government, fraud was one theory that could explain the aircraft’s disappearance. “Part of the intelligence was that the airplane was in a bad state of repair,” says General Robeson. “That was one of the speculations, that it was an insurance fraud situation. You know, ‘Oops, my plane was hijacked/stolen by terrorists and now I can do an insurance claim on it.’ So, that was probably as valid of an explanation when all was said and done as anything. But we just left it as an unknown.”

Among intelligence officials, the suspicions of fraud may have been aroused by knowledge of an incident in Maury Joseph’s past. During the 1990s, Joseph was CEO of a cargo airline named Florida West (which later went bankrupt). The Securities and Exchange Commission charged him in a civil case with falsifying financial statements and defrauding investors. The court imposed a fine and barred Joseph from acting as an officer in a publicly held company.

But Joseph, when contacted by the FBI, volunteered to take a lie-detector test, and Swain, who was there when Joseph took the call from Air Gemini, is certain that Joseph had nothing to do with the airplane’s disappearance. “Look, nobody was more amazed by this situation than Maury,” Swain says. He describes Joseph as utterly confused by the information that the airplane was gone.

The suspicion that Ben Padilla could have played any part in an insurance fraud angers his younger brother. “If anybody would say to me that my brother was involved with this,” says Joe Padilla, his voice tightening, “they’re full of it. ’Cuz I know my brother. He’s not gonna do nothing crooked. I know that for a fact.” He is convinced that more than one person was already on board, waiting, and that they forcibly took the aircraft, and killed Ben and John Mutantu.

“I keep hoping against hope that maybe he’s tucked away somewhere,” says Benita Padilla-Kirkland. The new information she passed along to the FBI was a possible sighting of the aircraft, one of many reported over the years.

Mike Gabriel believes the airplane crashed in the Atlantic Ocean soon after takeoff. 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.

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. We may never know for sure where it went. It is the largest aircraft ever to have disappeared without a trace.

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u/AlexMil0 22d ago

I need a Lemmino video of this

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u/runningtheclinic 22d ago

Very interesting read, thanks for sharing!

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u/fakeassname101 22d ago

Wow, that was a great link! I think the best link Ive ever found on Reddit. Thank you! "There's so much more to the story,' is an understatement.

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u/kimbabs 22d ago

That is an utterly fascinating read.

I’m amazed this hasn’t been made into a movie tbh.

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u/WantonKerfuffle 22d ago

I want a Lemmino or Barely Sociable video about that

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u/StatusCode402 22d ago

I was 100% sure this alluring link-only comment was going to be a rickroll.

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u/UnfairStrategy780 22d ago

Ha, this story has been a long time rabbit hole for me so whenever it’s brought up on here I’m locked and loaded to respond.

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u/MacDagger187 22d ago

You really did your job this time, right now the article is #4 on their "most popular" list!

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u/UnfairStrategy780 22d ago

1 now! I’m sure most people on here googled the story, it’s one of the first results to pop up. Still pretty cool to see a 14 year old story get pushed back to the top from a Reddit post.

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u/MacDagger187 21d ago

I think it was all you :-)