Showing posts with label Angola. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angola. Show all posts

Sunday, 13 April 2014

Aircraft that vanished


The hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines 777 goes on, and on, but, of course, it is not the only aircraft to have vanished without trace. Perhaps the most famous was the Lockheed Electra being flown by Amelia Earhart (pictured) in her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world in 1937. A voice message from Earhart and her navigator near Howland Island in the mid-Pacific was the last thing ever heard from the flight.

Much bigger aircraft have also disappeared. In 2003, a Boeing 727, being leased by TAAG Angola Airlines, took off from Luanda with its tracking transponder switched off. The aircraft had been idle for 14 months and had racked up millions of dollars in airport fees. No trace of it or the one person known to be on board has ever been found.

In 1962, a Flying Tiger Line Lockheed Super Constellation chartered by the US military disappeared over the western Pacific. It had departed from Travis Air Force Base, California, carrying 93 American soldiers to fight the Viet Cong, 3 South Vietnamese military personnel and 11 crew. The pilot’s last message gave the aircraft’s position as 280 miles west of Guam.


A tanker in the area reported seeing what looked like an aircraft exploding, but one of the biggest air and sea searches in the history of the Pacific found nothing. Another Super Constellation from Travis Air Base carrying secret military cargo crashed the same day in the Aleutian Islands, leading to strong suspicions that both were sabotaged.

Thursday, 19 March 2009

African floods + Windsor Castle fire

The Namibian government has declared a state of emergency because of floods that have killed at least 90 people. Crocodiles and hippos are said to be swimming through the flood waters, and attacking people. There have also been deaths in neighbouring Angola, and it is feared that food shortages could follow.

Floods in February and March last year drowned 42 people in Namibia. What was perhaps Africa’s worst ever flood came in 1927 when up to 3,000 were killed in the ports of Mostaganem and Oran in Algeria.

On this day....156 years ago, a young cook at Windsor Castle was about to go to bed when he found his room full of smoke. Queen Victoria was eight months pregnant, and her husband Prince Albert directed the fire-fighting from a window. As the castle’s own brigade, local volunteers and hundreds of soldiers struggled to quell the flames, London’s redoubtable fire chief James Braidwood commandeered a train, loaded engines, horses and men aboard and set off for Windsor.

Braidwood’s team arrived at one thirty in the morning, and by five the fire was out. Most of the damage was confined to the Prince of Wales Tower. The castle would suffer more serious damage in another blaze on November 20, 1992.