26/11/2025
Wonders of the world 🌎
On 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727-223 (tail number N844AA) that had been parked for over a year at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Luanda, Angola, suddenly took off without authorization.
Shortly before sunset, American flight engineer Ben Charles Padilla and Congolese mechanic John Mikel Mutantu boarded the aircraft, which was configured as a fuel hauler with its passenger seats removed. The jet taxied without radio contact, departed with its lights off and headed southwest over the Atlantic Ocean. It never filed a flight plan and stopped transmitting.
Fearing a potential terrorist threat, U.S. agencies including the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security led a worldwide search, but no wreckage or confirmed sighting of the plane or the two men has ever been found.