The 727 that Vanished: N844AA
 

No conclusive answers, but the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine has a good back story on the 727 that went missing from Luanda in May 2003 (previous threads here, here, here and here).

Air & Space: The 727 that Vanished

I/C

Great story, thanks for posting the link.

However, could this have a totally benign explanation? Two engineers doing taxi tests, getting to fast and - voila! - the bird flies. Panic sets in, the PPL tries - and fails - to fly her. Crashes into ocean.

The first part (high-speed taxi tests with inadvertent t/o) has happened in the past.

We will probably never know......

I remeber seeing a 727 in American colours in Dar Es Salaam after the one in Angola went mising. Wondered if that was the one everyone was looking for. Most likely one of the other decomisioned 727's on a ferry flight, wish I'd checked the reg though.

<<<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

You talk about fuel on the surface of the ocean, even if they had been informed that night who would have gone looking for them?

I've been involved on a few search and rescues out here in Africa, on all occasions it was other companies that put forth their own assets to look for the downed planes.

We never found anyone, though on one occasion the pilot and his passengers survived the ditching and were recovered 23 hours later by local fisherman. On seeing him at the airport I asked him about it all. He told me he'd seen the planes overhead searching for him. One by one they left. Then one turned towards him the final aircraft, he thought he'd been spotted, but it flew overhead and kept going. I asked him the reg number and he told me. Turns out it was mine :O Never saw him since he was right below us and we'd spent the last few hours overhead doing grid patern search over a ver small area with two other planes.

Plane goes down round here you might not even find anything. If it crashed in the bush it would be stripped within three days. A 737 went down a few miles from the runway, how long did it take to find them?

As for whoever flew out disapearing, it's all risk versus reward. How much was a junk 727 worth and was it worth enough to ditch your family in the states? I doubt it.

From what I hear Angola is pretty tightly controled, rumours of the aircraft almost hitting a fighter went around and it would not suprise me to learn Angolan military engaged an aircraft in their airspace, just ask the poor guys from Botswana, they got a intercepted and engaged even though it was a goverment flight on an official flight plan, fortunatly they all made it with a few injuries.

Just out of curiosity, anyone check if the reg had been repainted before the mysterious departure, if any onboard had any nice big insurance payouts if they disapeared.

I'm still trying to find out what happened to a South African Seneca that left Dar enroute to SA. Aircraft disapeared, no wreckage, all overland.

People say Africa is empty, once you been here a while you realise there is always someone out there. If she came down on land there would be clues, just got to find the right place to look.

As for the inadvertant flight. He taxied onto the runway without clearance or any communication. Manuvering on ground seemed eratic. If he had decided after all that to run the engines and he was charging down the runway and not being able to fly, why not just cut the power, or worse case shut the whole damn thing off and crab his ass and hope for the best rather than get airborne?

<<even if they had been informed that night who would have gone looking for them?>>

Soapbox Cowboy makes some very good points. The lack of SAR was repeatedly driven home to me.

In talking to the US State Department, if you go missing overseas, there is little to nothing the US government can do to look for you. Our embassies don't have the staff to mount large scale or intensive searches. They rely on the host government to do any searching...and Angola basically had little or no SAR resources nor did they seem to have much interest in the case.
And there was the problem that no one had any idea where to even begin looking.

The aircraft from what I heard is sitting in FZAA.

There is a former AA 727 sitting on "U" ramp in Cairo. Has been there for a few years. Reg is no longer N, and former reg can't be seen.

Incidentally is the 727 that was impounded in Harare during the attempted Equatorial Guinea coup still there? Or has that flown the coop?

It was still there in September 2007, when I was last in Harare, but that was, obviously, a while ago. Was parked on the military side of the airport.

Could this Luanda's 727 have anything related with the one that crashed last year in Mali/Niger Desert after crossing all the Ocean on a secret Drug's Ride:confused:

mali drug 727
 

Janet flight,

I wondered about that too so I contacted the DEA and asked. Despite repeated checking by my contact, the final word was that nobody knew or they weren't saying....which my contac found to be very strange.

If you've looked into this incident its not a big stretch to understand the official silence.

Seven years on and we still can't locate the AFR A330 that crashed into the Atlantic and a search was almost instantaneous for this one. You can't hide a 727 these days no matter how hard you try, so to my way of thinking, it did crash (probably at sea).

Reminds me of the scene in 'Lord of War' where an AN-12 is stripped by the locals in no time. :)

Curiously, that's the movies. Real life isn't like that. There is little of the structure of an aircraft that is useful to people in the bush, which is why the airframe usually remains more or less intact for years...

Not much use to people in the bush? Wires, handy for all kinds of things, snares, clothing repair, bags. Sheet metal, pots and pans, spears, arrows, fish hooks, Kerosene, great for starting fires and lamp fuel. Seats, what hut owner wouldn't be the envy of the neighburhood with a few plush chairs in his house. Seat belts, to hold your pants up. Tires, can be used as furniture and cut into durable shoes. Control cables, very strong kind of rope. Any number of toys for the kids can be fashioned from the fiddle little bits. Glass from instrument panels can be used in a similar fashion to a magnifying glass to start fires, and it's water proof. I'm sure there are lot's of other ideas out there :E

I heard of a 707 went of the runway in Kinshasa, cut to pieces by machette and axes and turned into pots and pans and housing accesories.

A CL-44 I believe that is what it was, last flying apparently, that went down in Congo was gone in three days, all that was left were items too large to move by a few men.

Once you've lived here a while you realise very little is thrown away, you just have to look at household waste in cities where there is a great supply of regular goods, all you find is scraps of food, and the bare scraps at that. Africans on the whole I've found to be very good and stretchign the life of things to their bitter end and then someone will turn up and find some final use that no one ever thought of.

Scrap metal is big buisness out here, so big in fact that they want to ban it. Guess some big shot in his mercedes busted his car driving into an open manhole, cover mysteriously disapeared in the night :hmm:

Soap Box,

Now that's more believable. Everthing you said is true. I spent a couple years living and flying in Africa and have seen aircraft parts in the weidest places. Not attached to airplanes! Even when flying contract to Kenya Airways back in 1991 with a DC-8 we couldn't stop the flight attendants from stealing all the flashlights and anything else that wasn't bolted down.

Thread drift, but I remember wandering amongst Angolan Mig 21's that had been subjected to a hatchet job - you could see into the fuel tanks on one. It was an unforgettable experience to see a life size cross section of a Russian cold war fighter (some really, really solid parts there!) The same experience for the many other wrecks around there, Mi24's, BMP's, etc, although the military stuff stays intact for a while, being made of sterner stuff. I had to gamble with the landmine issue to see some of the stuff but I kept my limbs, yay :)

Africa does swallow things whole though. A plane is actually relatively small.

Cowboy, please read my post properly! I said "structure" and "usually". Wires and seats aren't structure, and as Shrike confirmed the "structure" tends to remain largely intact. Sheet metal with rows of rivet holes every 4 inches isn't much use for pots and pans and heavy cutting gear is seldom available deep in the bush...as many wrecks in Africa attest to.

They get melted down for pots and pans so the rivet holes don't matter. Plenty of ally cookware all over Africa. Rumbek has what's left of a 748 just up the road from the airstrip. The entire aircraft has been cut up except for the heavy centre bulkhead around which the fuselage is built, and to which the main spars are attached. It's all that's left and that was a couple of years ago. Probably also gone now.

http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d1...beast/SP91.jpg

That 748 reminds me of a LET..;)

Or you could try looking at what remains of a 748 behind it.

Pots and pans....

hello Tim
 

arthur here now...scrolling through to see for myself...will e-mail my experience 2 you...and no...i don't know the two names mentioned

Tim, I am glad to see this story coming to the surface again. I have been involved in many Africa ferry operations and have checked out a number of 727 serial numbers on the continent in an effort to locate 844. I personally believe that most of the evidence...or lack thereof, points to the likelihood of a crash into the ocean. Otherwise the airplane or some of it's parts would have likely surfaced by now. I have a personal and professional curiosity to know what happened. These convoluted deals and shady operations are more common than people realize...luckily for most of us it does not end so tragically.

I also do not find it strange that the US or any government would do much to investigate this. The drug angle is also a dead end as it does not fit the profile or time period of those operations. I was in email contact with Ben's brother several years ago and I know that family is definitely in need of some answers and closure. I hope that you are able to investigate more leads and find more media venues to tell this story. For what it's worth, my company is willing to pay a reward of $10,000 usd to anyone that can prove if Ben Padilla is dead or alive. Hopefully you have stirred up some renewed interest that will provide some new answers. -Bob Allen

Cardinal, that picture you took is of a Let 410, no where near a 748!

I say again...

:rolleyes:

Is this it ??

:eek:

http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2423/dsc1050v.th.jpg

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

727 photo
 

I dont think is N844AA. If she wore the IRS colors, she got them after she was stolen. It's doubtful that IRS would have taken 44AA and put it into passenger service because the interior was totally gutted of insulation and covering panels. To get her back into passenger flying condition would have been a lot of work.

That said, I can contact someone who is very familiar with IRS airlines and ask about this aircraft.

Can you say where it is and when the photo was taken?

South Africa. FALA, Lanseria

727 photo
 

<<South Africa. FALA, Lanseria>>

Interesting coincidence. Lanseria and IRS both figure into the story.

Lanseria is where N844AA was supposed to be going. The airplane in the image was most likely part of a group of airplanes purchased together. If its sitting in Lanseria, then we can pretty confidently rule it out as being 44AA. The South African intelligence folks were very involved in the search and I doubt that aircraft escaped scrutiny unless its arrival there is fairly recent.

I wonder this forum sometimes.. do a little checking around.

The 748 was scrapped by the pot makers of Rumbek very quickly, but here is the photo of it.

File:Sudan Rumbek aircraft beside airstrip 2004.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The only reason the LET was not scrapped was because the Canadian (can't remember his name) LET operator from Arusha that had planes based in Akot for NPA paid for it for spares and the guy in the hut next to it protected it. Earlier this year the road from the airport was widened and a JCB throughly mangled it and pushed it to the side.

That pic is of 5N-RIR at Lanseria. It has been there for ages. In August it was cut up and sent North apparently to be used as a fire training rig

Wabulabantu, spot on!:ok:

All that was left of the 748 was the central bulkhead where the wings attach to the fuselage and even that has probably been turned into designer Sudanese cookware by now. With the let getting mangled in that manner, I doubt much remains either.

The point is that any wreck left unattended anywhere near large numbers of people in Africa will get stripped down to the basics pretty sharpish.

727 photo
 

I've been told that this aircraft was delivered in March/April of 2002 and was known in the US as N860AA. It was registered as 5N-RIR. Information with it indicates it was IRS airlines first 727-223. The information comes from the man who delivered the aircraft.

I see the 748.

When 844AA first arrived in Luanda from the USA it was grounded by the local Fed's because it didn't have an HF radio. An HF radio taken from a Cessna 206 (or close to it) including the long coaxial antenna was installed on 844AA. It may be possible to identify the aircraft by inspecting the belly and identifying the holes drilled aft of the EEC door along the center line of the belly where the antenna from the 206 was installed. The first hole would be roughly 3/8 diameter directly aft and close to the EEC access door and then approximately 8 more 1/8" holes drilled approx. 4' apart running aft along the belly. Attached to these holes were brackets that the antenna was attached to. So it is possible that on inspection from an experienced 727 mechanic or flight crew member and if these holes were not filled in,they may be able to identify these non conforming holes in the belly thus confirming that the aircraft is 844AA. By the way, after this bizarre installation of the HF antenna designed for a Cessna was installed on 844AA, the local Fed's signed it off.:ugh::eek:

Funky, according to the info embedded in the image is was taken in Aug 2008.

727 photo
 

<<Funky, according to the info embedded in the image is was taken in Aug 2008.>>

172, I dont see the date as being an issue but that was a good catch on your part. I should have noticed that.

I've shown this photo to the man who owned N844AA. He's sure that the two are not the same. In fact, he says delivered the aircraft in the photo to IRS and he sent me a photo of the aircraft as it was being delivered.

FYI, Fesmokie was part of the crew of N844AA and he was involved in the radio installation.

FunkyDick

Yes I was involved in the install however, after it was approved by the authorities in Luanda, it was removed because we were well aware of the fact it was non-conforming, illegal and so on. It was the biggest laugh we had the whole time we were there. We had another option and that was to install an HF that was purchased by Mr Irwin and we found out after the fact that it was from a Angolan military aircraft. It was quickly returned as far as I know.:ok:

FunkyStick

My sincere apologies for the Typo.:ugh: