<<<Jean Mutantu was the FE on the flight out of Luanda he now resides in the prison in Abuja for what I have never been able to find out. He knows the whereabouts of the aircraft for sure. I thought it was the 727 that crashed on takeoff somewhere on the west coast killing a lot of Lebanese PAX I was told by Mutantu's wife he was the FE on that flight too.>>>
I am the guy who wrote the story for Air & Space. I made a lot of calls overseas and talked to a lot of people who were involved in this story.
I was told several times that John Mikel Mutantu was a kid from the Congo who hung out at the airport in Luanda getting whatever work he could. He was not a pilot and he was not an FE. To my knowledge, he has not been seen or heard of since. He most certainly was not FE on the crash in Guinea that killed so many from Lebanon. That aircraft was a sister to N844AA and nothing more. The accident report on that crash is available on the internet and if you fly transport aircraft, the CVR transcript makes for sobering and disturbing reading.
Unfortunately, there was much more to this story than I was able to put into the article. There are still a lot of unanswered questions and people who get very nervous talking about it.
172Driver puts forth a very simple logical theory. However, if you look closely into the events that night, it falls apart. That is problem with every theory that I heard. None of them made sense with the facts at hand.
The most likely theory, in my mnd, is that the aircraft crashed somewhere at sea. But where? And what about the fuel sheen that it would have left? That should have been visible for days. But unfortunately, it was days before ANYBODY starting seriously looking for the aircraft.
This project went beyond "a story." For me, it became a compulsion.
cheers,
tim wright