STENDEC (nonfiction)
STENDEC was the last Morse code message sent by Star Dust, a British South American Airways (BSAA) Avro Lancastrian airliner which crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes on 2 August 1947, during a flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, Chile.
The plane's final m Morse tranmission was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". The Chilean Air Force radio operator at the Santiago airport described this transmission as coming in "loud and clear" but very fast; as he did not recognise the last word, he requested clarification and heard "STENDEC" repeated twice in succession before contact with the aircraft was lost. This word has not been definitively explained and has given rise to much speculation—including suggestions (made before the wreckage was finally discovered) that the aircraft and those aboard could have been the victims of a UFO encounter.
The staff of the BBC television series Horizon—which presented an episode in 2000 on the Star Dust disappearance—received hundreds of messages from viewers proposing explanations of STENDEC. These included suggestions that the radio operator, possibly suffering from hypoxia, had scrambled the word DESCENT (of which STENDEC is an anagram); that STENDEC may have been the initials of some obscure phrase or that the airport radio operator had misheard the Morse code transmission despite it reportedly having been repeated multiple times. The Horizon staff concluded that, with the possible exception of some misunderstanding based on Morse code, none of these proposed solutions was plausible.[10] It has also been suggested that WWII pilots used this seemingly obscure abbreviation when an aircraft was in hazardous weather and was likely to crash, meaning "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing". It is also known that all the crew including the flight attendant had prior WWII air service experience.[citation needed] However, this theory does not match with the rest of the message, which was reporting the flight's estimated arrival time.[citation needed]
The simplest explanation put forward to date is that the spacing of the rapidly sent message was misheard or sloppily sent. In Morse code, determining accurate spacing between characters is vital to properly interpret the message; STENDEC uses exactly the same dot/dash sequence as SCTI AR (airport code, "over"). SCTI AR is a transmission that would have been expected to occur in the given context.[citation needed]
Alternatively, the Morse spelling for STENDEC is one character off from instead spelling VALP, the call sign for the airport at Valparaiso, some 110 kilometers north of Santiago.