If you own a car, then you definitely always make sure that the doors are locked when you leave it in a parking lot, on the street, in your driveway, or just any time that you leave it unattended. It’s the easiest way to prevent your car from being stolen. Stealing a car is actually easy if we think about it; you just open the door, start the engine and then drive off. Practically anybody can drive a car even if they don’t have a license or much experience behind the wheel. But what about stealing a plane? What about stealing a huge jetliner like a Boeing 727?
The Boeing 727 was produced and flown between 1962 – 1984 and was 133 ft. long, had room for 106 passengers, and was able to fly over 2,500 miles. To be able to fly one, a pilot needed hundreds of hours to get comfortable and even thousands to be a confident and tested veteran pilot of the plane.
If you have ever been on a commercial flight and gotten to take a peek into the cabin where the pilot, co-pilot, and navigator are, you know that there are all sorts of buttons, screens, knobs, and things that non-pilots have no idea about. Nobody would think that they could easily fly a plane without any training or knowledge.
The Strange Disappearance of the Boeing 727
Unlike your car parked in a garage or driveway, airplanes park in designated areas at airports with little fear about someone breaking into and flying a plane away. However, in 2003 a Boeing 727 was stolen by people with no experience flying.
The plane was never seen again, and it is not known who exactly was on board nor if the plane ever made it to another destination, or if it crashed. Just before sunset on May 25th, 2003 at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Luanda, Angola, one of the Boeing 727s that had been parked there suddenly began to taxi towards the runway.
The plane was not scheduled to fly, and the control tower could not communicate with the plane. It was obvious that an inexperienced pilot was at the controls because the plane moved erratically while taxiing. The plane then managed to take off and fly away without any lights on, so it soon disappeared into the darkening evening sky.
Who Stole the Plane?
This incident became a global scandal since this was just two years after the terrorist attack of September 11, and intelligence services, especially the CIA, were worried that the plane could be used in a similar attack. Witnesses at the airport in Luanda had conflicting stories about how many people they saw enter the plane. Maybe one. Maybe two.
It was determined that American Ben Padilla and Congolese John Mutantu were the individuals who stole the plane though neither of them were qualified to fly the 727. For days the U.S. military was on high alert, and intelligence agencies went into action to track down the plane to make sure it was not going to be used as a weapon.
The plane and the two supposed individuals who were on board have never been found. When the plane took off it had 14,000 gallons of fuel which meant it had a range of 1,500 miles. That meant that there was a wide area to investigate possible locations where it could have landed, or more likely, crashed. Luanda is a coastal city, so a large swath of the Atlantic Ocean was searched in case any debris from a crashed plane was found.
Over the years people have claimed to have seen the plane flying or landing in other African countries such as Burundi and Guinea or even that it was shot down by the Angolan Air Force. Nobody knows for certain what happened. One thing is for certain, to this day, this is the largest plane that has been stolen and disappeared, though why and who did it will remain a mystery.
