Boeing 727 N844AA left Luanda on 25 May 2003 with the lights off, the radio silent, and a dead transponder. Two men were on board. Neither was a pilot. The jet has never been found, and private detective Julian Bray says the flight was a planned theft, not a freak accident.
Before it rolled, the airplane had taken on 53,000 liters of fuel, about 14,000 gallons, enough to reach Nigeria from Angola and come back. Guards left the wheels unchocked even though the jet was being held for unpaid debts. Bray says the batteries and hydraulics had been worked for weeks. That is a departure someone prepared, not a whim.
Two technicians, and no license to fly
The two were Ben Padilla, an American flight engineer, and John Mutantu, a mechanic. A Boeing 727 is meant to fly with three qualified pilots. Witnesses said this one wandered on the runway and still lifted off, turning out over the Atlantic: an airliner of about 80 tons, in the hands of two men who were not supposed to touch the controls.
Bray calls the story of an accidental theft a fairy tale.
Where Bray says the jet went
A crash at sea does not hold up. In 2003 the United States swept the Atlantic with the satellites it had.
His version puts the 727 down on one of the abandoned military strips still scattered through the African bush, many of them left from the Second World War. A night with paint and a new serial number, he argues, would have been enough to hand the airplane to a dictator or a cartel.
Padilla's family says he was taken
Relatives say Padilla was seized while he was in the cockpit checking engines, and that he never agreed to fly the jet out.
Bray has Padilla as the man who set the theft up. He had been in trouble with the law, and Bray believes he was paid to move the airplane deeper into Africa.
N844AA is still the only large jetliner on record that disappeared and left nothing behind.
