How a Boeing 727 Was Stolen (And Never Found)

How a Boeing 727 Was Stolen (And Never Found)

We have heard that soneone hijacked an aeroplane but Have you ever heard that an aeroplane had been stolen from airport ? Yes, a massive Boeing 727 was stolen from a airport. Let's talk about it in details.

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May 25
2003
Luanda, Angola

It was 5 pm. Boeing 727 began taxing without communicating with ATC. And entered the runway. ATC tried to contact but there was no response. The aircraft took off and headed southwest towards the Atlancic Ocean.

How did it happened?

Two men boarded the Boeing 727 which had been grounded and sat idle at Luanda.But all of the passenger seats have been removed. And was outfitted to carry diesel fuel. One man was an American pilot and flight engineer, Ben C. Padilla. And the other was, John M. Mutantu, who was a hired mechanic from the Republic of the Congo. Both of them weren't certified to fly Boeing 727. As well ad Boeing 727 requires 3 crew members to fly.

The aircraft was filled with 53000 liters of fuel. With that amount of fuel it could fly around 1500 miles. They tried to find the aircraft. But they were failed to find it. As well as those two men were disappeared with that aircraft.

Immediately after its disappearance, American intelligence operators said "the plane mostly likely was taken for a criminal activities such as drugs or weapons smuggling. And it was not even 2 years aftet 9/11 attacks. So security agencies in the US were doubting about that as well.

Theories

One of the theory is that Padilla and Mutantu accidentally crashed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean. Padilla’s siblings added another twist here, that Padilla had said that if he was ever kidnapped, he would crash the plane into the ground or water. They suggested he and Mutantu may have been forced to steal the plane, and then killed. What if there had been a third person in the plane that no one outside noticed? This one is plausible because a Boeing 727-223 requires a three-person properly-trained crew to fly. Since Padilla had had access to the plane, it is likely he had let someone else in unnoticed.

For 14 months, the plane had been grounded at the airport due to multiple paperwork problems. It had accrued over $4 million in airport fees alone and the leasee, TAAG Angola Airlines, didn’t look like they were ever going to pay. So the plane’s owner, Miami-based Aerospace Sales & Leasing, sent Padilla to Angola to repair the plane and fly it to Johannesburg. Aerospace’s owner, Maury Joseph, had found a buyer for the plane’s three engines in Johannesburg. Joseph got Padilla to steal it as part of an elaborate insurance fraud. In his defense about that claim, Joseph has always claimed he could not be paid because he couldn’t prove his plane was stolen. There was some context here; in the mid-1990s Joseph had been charged with fraud and was even banned from heading any company with shareholders. Faced with this new allegation of fraud, he offered himself up to the FBI for a lie-detector test.