Ten aviation mysteries that refuse to reveal their secrets

A slew of aviation mysteries continue to defy the best that science and exploration can throw at them. Air travel has taken humankind to some of the remotest parts of the world, which in the early days could involve a step into the relative unknown. Some of those who have been lost were adventurers making strides in aviation, without GPS or black boxes, while others were on routine flights in the modern world of flight.

New technology has led to fresh searches in many of the cases, including the most infamous of all, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. Today, a major search is taking place for a Bering Air plane which vanished mid-flight with nine passengers onboard over a remote part of Alaska. At the heart of each case are the human stories and the loved ones left behind who continue to search for answers as the years go by.

Here is a breakdown of 10 of the most enduring aviation mysteries stretching back more than 80 years. On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur en-route to Beijing. The Boeing 777 failed to reach its destination, with the 239 passengers and crew vanishing without trace, despite the most extensive air-sea search in history. Debris — including a wing section called a flaperon — has washed up on Réunion Island near Mauritius, around 3,500 miles from Malaysia.

French investigators confirmed in 2015 that the fragment matches records held by a Boeing subcontractor who made the part fitted to MH370. But the black box, the device recording flight tracking data and cockpit voice recordings, has not been found. Relatives of those onboard continue to press for answers. In January, Metro told how a Houston-based robotics company, Ocean Infinity, is working with Malaysian officials to use drones in a search of 6,000 miles of ocean floor.

Marking the anniversary last year, Anne Daisy Nathan, whose mum Grace was onboard, told Metro: ‘The tragedy started out as me wanting to have some closure. ‘But in the years since it has progressed it has extended beyond our closure. For me personally, it’s now important that MH370 is found in order to prevent something like this from happening again. ‘All of us, as we or our loved ones take to the skies, we owe it to ourselves and to our loved ones to find out what happened to MH370.’.

Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished as they attempted to circumnavigate the world around the Equator. Earhart, who was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic solo, and her companion are thought to have come down somewhere over the Pacific. They were headed for a refueling point on Howland Island at the time they disappeared. A vast, multi-million dollar search proved fruitless.

Bones discovered on the Pacific coral atoll of Nikumaroro are a 99% match for Earhart, according to a US peer reviewed science journal which published its findings in 2018. The research in Forensic Anthropology suggests she died as a castaway. However other experts are sceptical. Some of the most perplexing aviation mysteries have taken place in the Bermuda Triangle. One of the strangest was the loss of Flight 19, a group of five US Navy bombers which took off from Fort Lauderdale in Florida on December 5, 1945.

One of the pilots on the training flight said in a radio message, ‘I don’t know where we are, we must have gotten lost after that last turn.’. Radio stations were able to locate Flight 19 somewhere north of the Bahamas, off the coast of Florida. In a final transmission, another pilot said they would ditch when the first plane dropped below 10 gallons. Hundreds of planes searched over land and water for days, but no bodies or debris have ever been found.

Named ‘Romance of the Skies’, Pan Am Flight 7 had been due to fly from San Francisco to the first stop in Honolulu in Hawaii on a luxurious, round-the-world flight. The 36 passengers and eight crew onboard were due to enjoy seven-course gourmet meals and champagne in the cocktail lounge after the ‘ocean liner of the air’ took off on November 8, 1957. Radio contact was lost with the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser about halfway through the flight, with no distress call having been received. A five-day search recovered 19 bodies, with some of deceased wearing life jackets, showing the aircraft’s occupants had time to prepare to go into the sea.

Debris was also found hundreds of miles east of Honolulu. The remaining victims and the plane itself, built in times before black boxes, has never been located. Evidence of elevated carbon monoxide was found in the tissue of some of the victims. However, the US Civil Aeronautics Board could not determine the cause of the crash with any certainty. Tasked with a secret mission, Flying Tiger Line Flight 739 vanished in the early days of the Vietnam War.