What Happened to Flight 739?

welcome welcome welcome to another episode of decoding the unknown as always hello there i'm your host simon in this one what happened to flight 739 uh katie wrote this i'm gonna read it it's a cold read that's what we do here i've never heard of flight 739 although i feel like this is one of those things where you read in you're like ah yeah that mega famous flight crash where hundreds of people died or something like that although there's generally not that many mystery while there's that malaysian airlines airliner which just completely disappeared and no one really seems to know what happens i mean obviously it crashed in the ocean it didn't get abducted by aliens or anything like that but uh that's that's mysterious i feel like they found parts of it though didn't they find parts of it at some point i mean look it's not gonna be happy ending there is it look let's just jump into it what happens to flight 739 let's go [Music] a military plane a secret mission a mysterious disappearance conspiracy theorists ahoy let's find out about the final days of flying tiger lines flight 739 wait so it's flying tiger lines that sounds like an airline rather than a military plane anyway let's just jump in i'm sure katie's going to explain all of that to us because that's what she does i have no idea what's going on that's my job i just sit here and read it and see what happens the history after the end of world war ii american robert prescott who had been a pilot for the flying tigers squads that carried out bombing raids in japan well there we go it wasn't an airline it was a squad started his own airline oh my god and it is an airline oh this is the twists and turns in the first two lines of this script which he called the flying tiger line i mean it's a good name so i suppose you'd stick with it if you could teaming up with ten pilot pals from the original squad who had cool names like duke headman link laughlin and catfish rain although i'm assuming that wasn't his actual name at birth i know catfish rain no one calls their kid catfish although maybe in 2021 i mean you see like celebrities you see some absolutely absurd names out there i really really you know you're already the son of someone famous right did you just want to make their life more difficult why not just call him john rather than like cal al nick cage looking at you on that one it's not already bad enough or cool enough or just different enough that nick cage is your dad you had to be called cal al really come on prescott's new flying tyler tiger line became the us's first scheduled cargo lie airline in 1949 and was also used a fair bit to transport and evacuate military personnel between the 1950s and 1970s in the korean and vietnam wars with its motto of anything anytime anywhere the flying tiger line was hugely successful it also sounds like it's going to open itself up for investigation they say what were you what you said would transport anything so pablo escobar came along and he just wanted to transport cocaine and we said well i guess we've got no choices in our motto it's in our motto oh god we're all going to jail they were constantly pushing the anvil open using the biggest and most advanced aircraft available it was trusted with cargo routes all over the world and among many other things was responsible not only for carrying the first new 50-star american flag and the torch for the statue of liberty but also transporting shamu the killer whale to a sea world venue in ohio 1974 along with 10 dolphins a 3 000 pound elephant seal called el google and a duck that could apparently play the piano that last one sounds like a lie the duck can maybe walk on the piano and if you call that playing well you're dumb in 1980 the flying tiger line became the largest cargo carrier in the world it even set a world record back in 1965 for being the first aircraft to make an aerial circumnavigation of the earth via the poles using a modified boeing 707-349-c the flying tiger line was a big deal it's not that surprising as it was bought out by fedex in the late 1980s that's probably a happy ending if you're the most successful carrier in the world and you're getting bought out by fedex someone is writing you a massive check and for like an old military pilot that's going to be a good time to inject a little early taste of intrigue here i'd like to go back a bit and mention that the commander of the original world war ii flying tigers unit was one claire luciano perhaps rather sexistly of me i thought this was a woman and was surprised and excited to find out more but it turned out it was just a man with the first name claire that's gonna be like whoa there was a a commander of a of a world war ii unit would be i feel who's being a woman like in an airline unit although there were flying witches out of the soviet union but that's a very specific case and i've made a couple of videos about that so i feel like this would definitely be something i knew about just because it's cool enough to have a video on it but uh no it was just a dude named claire i think his buddy dudes are called hillary claire is worse he was also nicknamed old leatherface which might have given me a clue but there you go anyway chanel also created his own airline after world war ii originally called civil air transport the aim of this airline was to get relief supplies into china to help fight against mao zedong's communist forces spoiler they didn't win after this didn't work out the airline was on the face of it a civilian transport service from 1950 to 1976 but it was actually owned by the cia oh my god the cia's got so much money this is one of those things it's like yeah the cia's the u.s military or whatever you know same sort of secret budget just billions or not trillions right it's not trillions at all hundreds of billions of dollars i'm sure just going to the cia and it's like the amount of money they have they're just like yeah yeah we'll buy a cargo airline just so we can move stuff around the world quietly without it having like cia written on the side it's just or using military planes i guess is more realistic but that is just unbelievable it's cool it's also terrifying it's cool but terrifying it changed its name to air america in 1959. there were many dealings between the two companies including civil air transport planes being modified at robert prescott's flying tiger line base and various aircraft sales between the two so let's just say there's definitely room for undercover shenanigans going on there yeah at some point they get a check and it's just signed cia and they're like wait a second what's going on who slipped up are you the cia so let's get back to the plane in question flying tiger line flight 739 which also had the registration of n6921c it was a five-year-old lockheed l-1049 superconstellation propliner on march 14th 1962 it took off from travis air force base in california with 96 military personnel on board including three vietnamese soldiers a crew of 11 civilians making a total of 107 people on the plane it had to make a few scheduled refuelling stops before reaching its destination of saigon once there the mission was apparently for the soldiers on board to take over training vietnamese soldiers to fight the viet cong the first couple of stops were fine just minor delays caused by small maintenance issues to two of the four engines but seemingly nothing to worry about if i was on a plane and it had four engines they were like yeah yeah just just a little bit of maintenance on two out of these four engines i'll be like please say they're on different sides and also what the flying was also way more dangerous in the past this is like the 1960s planes were crashing like often it was not i mean i guess it was relatively safe and all that people still got on planes but it was like people died in plane crashes nowadays it's like very rare it just makes the news because it's a lot of people the plane took off from its third stop in guam at 12 57 gmt on the 15th of march 1962 with apparently more than enough fuel to cover the distance to its next stop the clark air base in the philippines flight 739 went on its way all was well according to radio call at 14 22 gmt and there was supposed to be another check-in at 15 30 gmt but the control tower at guam was having issues with static following a call to a different plane and it missed the window by a few minutes when it was finally up and running again at 15 39 it could not make contact with the flying tiger plane the radio communication at 1422 was the last anyone heard a flight 739 the plane was officially reported lost and the largest search operation of the time was launched on the 16th of march 1962 covering around 200 000 square miles at 520 000 square kilometers it's a lot of space of the pacific ocean and harnessing the combined forces of the us air force navy marines and u.s coast guard over a period of eight days not a trace of the plane or its passengers has ever been found so why is this so mysterious okay i'm like okay as a plane it disappeared especially back in the day i feel like it's more likely for planes to disappear because there definitely wasn't gps uh like i guess there would there's radar but that's gonna be way less reliable there's gonna be way less technology so it's gonna be harder to recover ultimately planes do crash and fall into the sea without much of a trace even today just look at malaysian airlines flight 370 from 2014. what makes the disappearance of flying tiger lions flight 739 more tantalizing though is the width of conspiracy and cover-up that surrounds it and the fact that as time goes on it gets less and less likely that the truth will ever be fully known but as we've often discussed as we've discussed on this channel before the longer something goes on like if there's a conspiracy at the start much more likely that the conspiracy is real sort of statistically because over time the chances of someone leaking it increases the more years go by the greater that chance becomes so like the moon landing sure 1960s maybe people thought it would be faked but there were thousands of people involved in that and over the time people have died there would have been deathbed confessions something would have happened someone wrote a book someone would have wanted cashed in someone would be sent to prison there would be a deal and the truth would have come out because it's just too many people over too long a time again like with this kind of stuff i'm like well the longer that goes by the less likely it is to be a conspiracy to begin with the rescue party were probably reasonably sure of finding something as they had the last known location of the plane when it had checked in the previous day and they knew the direction that it was going yeah but it can go on a massive detour that was a long time ago in plain flying terms also there was an apparent witness to the event oh a liberian tanker was floating around minding his own business when the crew spotted vapor trails disappearing into some clouds they then heard a double explosion and saw two red balls of flame falling from the sky at different speeds that's got to be really like not scary because you're not in danger but it's like oh my god i just watched people die it's pretty intense it's like that uh that formula one i watched that drive to survive and a couple of like when the roman gerard jean has a crash where he goes into the wall and his car is just obliterated and a friend of mine who's really interfering with sent me the clip and he was just like dude i think i just watched someone die on live tv and i'm like this was after we know it was okay and you just see that car going into that wall you're like how did what did the technology is amazing it's like the front of his car was obliterated it didn't exist anymore and then he was in flames for like a minute and he walks out and he's like yeah my hand's a bit busted up that's it wild if you haven't seen drive to survive i'd never watch formula one didn't really have any interest in formula one that documentary series is incredible stop watching this or listening to this and go check out drive to survive on netflix not a sponsor should be a sponsor i'd love netflix to sponsor that'd be cool the tanker's radar pegged this at about 17 miles 27 kilometers away from them at 500 miles 805 kilometers off the coast of guam which is where flight 739 should have been around that time so case closed then right obviously this was the plane with its military passengers exploding in mid-air and falling into the pacific well yes probably that was the outcome but the lockheed super constellations were safe planes specifically used by by the airline because of their reliability record yeah sort of but that's a fairly weak argument in my opinion because planes today any plane i'm sure modern plane would blow except for that 737 max we all know what that story was um any modern playing today surely blows the safety record out of the water compared to any of these older planes doing these same routes and planes today still crash because of well pilot error probably mostly but also mechanical stuff can go wrong the the max thing was the the autopilot was fighting them and crashed them into the ground which is insane um yeah planes crash reliable planes crash just less so why did this one explode and how the tanker did immediately head over to the area of the explosion and search for several hours but found nothing also i didn't mention this earlier but now seems like a good time to say that not only were the 93 american soldiers on the plane they all just happened to be army rangers oh wow these are like elite soldiers these are elite combatant operations specialists so it seems a little unlikely they were just popping over to vietnam to train up some soldiers and remember this was 1962 a few years before the u.s officially entered the war so something was definitely going on on the hush hush see intrigued now eh yeah i'm pretty intrigued this sounds like way more like someone wanted to take out a whole bunch of elite army rangers who were going to vietnam to cause some trouble but also they could be going there as like consultants like consultants to like train the southern vietnamese army against the north vietnamese right because that was definitely something that was was that going on in 1962 it was going on before obviously the official war of vietnam began i don't know my vietnam war history is not good enough to to know the exact date theories [Music] let's take for granted that the tanker did see the remains of the plane falling into the ocean if we take this eyewitness account out of the equation we're not left with much to make a story out of and it could probably and we could probably just assume that the plane ran out of fuel had mechanical problems and ditched somewhere between guam and the philippines yes totally that tanker story that i maybe there's a reason for the tank of people to lie but it seems like a pretty unlikely thing to lie about also they'd have to know about this plane and then it also conveniently goes missing seems pretty likely that the tank people are telling the truth maybe katie will tell me something later on to persuade me different but i think that plane crashed like doesn't seem to run out of fuel does it a double explosion doesn't seem very likely but the evidence of something happening at the correct time and place to account for it being flight 739 is very compelling fully agree so what could have caused the plane to blow up mid-flight well two of the engines have been tinkered with on two different fuel stops but the pilot reported no issues in his 1422 radio report and it didn't seem that there was a serious problem with either engine even if they had stopped working the plane wouldn't be blown apart in the years since aviation experts have all agreed that this type of plane just exploding as it flew along was totally unthinkable yeah i mean planes they don't generally explode unless they're being blown up they they crash into the ocean or the land by not bombs also under normal circumstances there wouldn't be anything on board powerful enough to cause this kind of thing something might have happened to cause the plane to explode the weather was clear and fine so it wasn't a storm or a lightning strike or anything like that let's look at some of the other theories behind the explosion and before you get your hopes up simon there really isn't an extraterrestrial angle to this one oh no i love it on exploring the unknown when the aliens come into it someone's always being like i bet if you google it flight 739 flight 739 flight 739 aliens i bet you someone's coming up with some theory about aliens because of course they are because it's the internet google goes deep i know you complain when aliens pop up but i don't know deep down you love it really i love it i mean i do believe aliens are real i just don't think they're coming to earth and blowing up flights because they don't care we watch i'm watching this tv show with my wife called invasion and it just bothers me because the aliens they come and they kill us like but individually like these aliens come down to the planet and there's like plenty of scenes when the aliens are killing people and i'm like yo these aliens traveled from however far away really really far in spaceships and they seem incredibly powerful what business do they have just killing us individually if they want us gone they would just make us gone it would be like us fighting individual ants it would be absurd so just for you maybe it was aliens okay now that's out of the way let's go down to some more likely stuff sabotage this was a plane full of soldiers heading to an area in the middle of a conflict zone could there have been someone who deliberately messed with the plane at one of the scheduled stops to prevent it from getting to its destination none of the three areas the plane landed in were secure so anyone on the bases potentially had access to it every time it is therefore possible that the engines were somehow deliberately tampered with or maybe there was even a bomb stowed away on board this was actually my own idea as i haven't seen this theory pop up in any of the research that i did for the story yeah that does seem pretty likely i have to say i'm definitely leaning towards the fact that someone blew up this plane there's motivation there's the bomb the the explosions in the sky i'm kind of leaning towards that right now and someone's slipping a bomb onto the plane like at one of these air bases where it stops refueling kind of seems likely there are plenty of references to sabotage but none to bombs in particular i don't know anything about bomb making in the 1960s but i suppose it's unlikely to be able to smuggle something presumably quite large onto a plane without somebody noticing it but hey it's a theory maybe you could stick some c4 near the fuel tanks or something i don't know i'm just throwing it out there yeah you don't need much bomb to take out a plane really not much at all just enough to like knock a wing off blurp a fuel tank depressurize the cabin big old hole in the side you don't need that much bomb well i'm fairly sure if there's a grenade on a grenade goes off on a plane it's probably not gonna work it's not going to work out for that plane that'd be fascinating why if a grenade does go off on a plane has that ever happened in history maybe someone in the comments would know if you're watching this on youtube if you're listening to it on a podcast then that's unfortunate you don't get to you don't get to find out the grenade discussion that probably happened in the video so you can watch on youtube as well happy days or maybe there was a traitor on board who set up and set an explosion off themselves a communist sympathizer or just an unhinged psychopath again just spitballing here but a blue sky thinking don't roast me in the comments i'm gonna get roasted as well in the comments aren't i because i'm kind of agreeing that this seems pretty likely i don't know about the suicide bomber though i think like i don't know i feel like before 9 11 people were like yeah i mean wait you've got to beat you've got to get off the plane though once you put the bomb on there although after my genius wave of blues sagai thinking outside the box i investigated a little further and did find some information that might give a bit more oomph to this theory i didn't really think about the fuel stops that much i just imagined them as fairly short stops to fill up the plane but of course they would have taken a while and the passengers and crew would have got off to stretch their legs the flight had also been going for over a day at this point so the pilots especially would need to rest at the first stop in hawaii the head of the flight crew complained that there wasn't enough of a crew rest area so an extra mattress was brought aboard which added half an hour or so to the stop a mattress you say why wouldn't that be big enough to conceal some sort of explosive or maybe i'm totally overthinking it and it was a blow-up mattress in a tiny bag also could totally been checked for security before it goes on although i feel like military planes and stuff that that's going to be way less do they have security when you go on a military flight they've maybe not right because you've got to be like these rangers and stuff they probably got bombs and how do they get bombs do they like take grenades on planes to take them around the world and take them places that sounds dangerous uh but these dudes i don't know if they go through airport security also airport security in the 1960s was probably a joke even on like regular commercial flights until someone like blew something up and were like whoa someone blew a blow up a plane we should have some sort of security but wait there's more at the next stop on wake island four of the flight crew were replaced i assume as scheduled as opposed to any other issues maybe one of the departing party had left something on board ready to blow up or one of the new crew brought something on i'm not accusing anyone in particular just trying to solve a mystery here also at what would turn out to be the final stop in guam the plane was left unattended for a while after the routine maintenance checks have been carried out a perfect opportunity for sabotage so with my conspiracy hat on this does seem like a possible explanation for the explosion there was literally something happening every time the plane landed also there's the other line of thought that as the flying tiger lines were increasingly being used to military transport as well as their usual cargo runs maybe they were overstretched and maintenance and general checks on the planes went a bit by the wayside does that really happen maybe in the 1960s i feel like today they're not just like oh yeah we're really busy so we didn't check that plane over before we sent it on a flight because that's going to open you up to such massive liability and fines and probably jail time for whoever allows that to happen because that is extremely bad now i've mentioned this before i'm learning to fly every time we get in that plane it's like you've got to check everything you're checking that the wings are attached properly you're checking the oil you're checking the fuel twice you're doing all of this stuff just to make sure that this little plane is going to be okay with big planes i'm sure the checklist is a lot longer and they do it every time because you know you're getting in that plane you want it to be safe even if this were the case though aviation experts have agreed that that in the normal course of flying operations this sort of explosion just wouldn't happen unless undeclared things were on board and there were no huge weapons or anything like that just clothing and personal effects even the executive vice president of the flying tiger line stuck his neck out and said that it was impossible for the super constellation to explode so something violent must have happened how come this bomb theory has never been floated online this does seem extremely likely there were two explosions maybe a bomb went off and then the fuel ignited i don't know if that's how that works but look there was a there was a bang that oil tanker which seems to be telling the truth because i can't work out a reason for them to lie there was a bang a bomb went off this seems extremely likely kidnap sure it's possible the plane could have been hijacked but is it really that likely where would it have happened at one of the fuel stops presumably but this was a plane with almost 100 elite soldiers on it so i think any potential hijacker would realize their mistake pretty quick and just walk quietly off at the next stop yes it's like this is like the reverse conair it's like conair except everyone is an elite army ranger who could probably kill you with their toes it's like what have i done i've kidnapped the wrong plane there were no reports of ransoms and the plane seemed on course for where it was supposed to be unless it had veered off just after the 1422 radio call and had flown for over an hour in a different direction and the thing that exploded was just something else entirely if this was the case presumably it still crashed somewhere as nothing was heard from the plane or passengers again it would have just meant that the rescue party was looking in the wrong place the pilot did request a change of altitude from 10 000 to 18 000 feet in a radio call at 1325 gmt this was approved with no reasons being given or queried there was also a bit of cloud but otherwise the weather was clear so visibility should have been fine the tanker saw vapor trails going into some cloud but no one on board could confirm seeing the plane itself and there was no explanation given for this altitude change i don't know if it was a weird request or just a routine thing that pilots do to avoid clouds or fly faster basically i have no idea if there's anything to be made of it or not it's a fairly big change in altitude from 10 to 18 000 i don't know how high planes flew at this time or what that plane's normal altitude is or at what point of the journey it was on but it's not it's definitely not crazy unreasonable i it didn't stick out to me as something strange plain strange altitude all the time it would obviously be more weird if it was flying at 10 000 feet in the middle of the flight that would be strange assuming it can fly at 18 000 feet all other radio reports had been perfectly normal with no strange messages or distress calls being sent after repeated attempts to contact flight 739 after radio contact was re-established by the guam tower it was officially declared lost at 22 27 gmt which is the time at which all of its fuel would have run out [Music] collision with an object the crew of the tanker saw two farbles falling towards the sea at different speeds maybe these were two different objects as opposed to two halves of the same plane yeah but it's gonna have to be a fairly massive accident you're gonna have to crash into something substantial for there to be two things and were there any other planes that were missing at exactly the same time i feel like the tenerife airport disaster is one of the most memorable i mean it was the worst aviation accident in history but it was also super memorable because it was two giant planes crashing into each other on the runway i feel like if two giant planes crashed into each other in mid-air that would be something i would know about that would be like you know it would be memorable like tenerife there was that other one it was was it china air or something where these two planes they're just absolutely flying towards each other and they missed by like a hundred meters it was crazy and they they changed some rules with flights um the this is what's so interesting about planes and flying like any time there's an error they fix it so it doesn't happen again like they report on it there's these super transparent reporting so the pilots can say we really screwed this up or like something went wrong and then they work on fixing it so with this one this is such a tangent for like aviation nerds but uh these two planes were flying towards each other however it happened and like there was some confusion with air traffic control and uh basically just at the and they had their devices on board which alert them to uncommon oncoming traffic like completely separate uh air traffic control and just at the last minute one of them just happened to pull out of the way and there was a big argument or like a decision over do you listen to air traffic control or do you listen to listen to the collision avoidance thing because they needed to be on the same page because that will allow them to avoid each other and they're like yeah ignore air traffic control always just do what your collision avoidance thing says i'm like that's cool are they just adapt and change i like it tangent over we're getting back to it they were a fair distance away after all what could have that other thing been there is an almost impossibly small but still teeny tiny chance the plane was hit by something like a meteorite oh my god guys the odds of this are just astronomical low astronomically low i mean literally astronomical this has apparently never happened in the history of avionics but maybe it has and that's what caused the odd mystery crash or two meteorites do make it down this far and on rare occasions have struck things on earth's surface see for example the new york peak skill meteorite car which got hit in the trunk in 1992 and hasn't stopped milking it since it's even got its own website so why not a plane well one there's not that many planes there's a lot of cars and it seems that one car has been hit in history the surface area of cars in the world compared to the surface area of planes is crazy different as no wreckages has ever been recovered we can of course never know for sure but we could be damn close to certain it wasn't a meteorite guys there's even something else that could have hit flight 739 though and that's a missile some people expressed doubt about the russians for at the time it was only them who could have launched such a strike that would take out a cargo plane like this and yes this was a plane full of army rangers this wasn't a run-of-the-mill plane load of piano playing ducks they were transporting nice call back according to family members of the missing men they had been hand-picked from across the country and at least a few had been confirmed as communications and electronic specialists this points to potential wiretapping and espionage missions at the very least the soviet union and the u.s were supporting different sides in the vietnam conflict so this made a large dent in the us's operational capabilities potentially ending any plans they had before they even started this ties into family of the missing soldiers reporting that the men had left important belongings behind such as wedding rings and id cards perhaps indicating that they indeed were going on a covert mission with a high chance of capture or death some men even explicitly said they didn't think they'd be coming back holy this is some intense mission they have also been all but disavowed by the u.s government and the names have not been added to the vietnam west veterans memorial wall as to do so would be an admission that they were indeed involved in the conflict long before the u.s officially landed troops on the ground i suppose it's a weird place for the soviet union to have taken the plane out but as we have discovered it totally disappeared so it turned out to be the perfect place to hide all traces of evidence yeah i mean you don't want to take it out in a place where it's like yeah yeah it's a pretty obvious place for the soviets to do it isn't it actually then maybe they'd be like it's too obvious it can't be the soviets you're doing some out of the way place where they don't expect you to be doing it this also seems like a very credible possibility in this one i'm totally into the conspiracy theorist this plane did not just disappear it was blown up either by a bomb or a missile it just doesn't seem like a conspiracy theory it seems like logical thought if the tank hadn't been there no one would be any wiser no one ever took responsibility for taking the plane down although with international tensions at a high point maybe that's to be expected if it wasn't the russians though could friendly fire have been to blame i hate the term friendly fire it sounds like something that wouldn't hurt you because it likes you or a nice place to sit around and toast marshmallows how about snafu fire or totally scrap fire or getting accidentally killed by your own side fire yes as the plane was charted through a civilian airline this whole thing has managed to be sidestepped by the u.s government as not being an official armed forces or government operation no no it's just a coincidence that 60 army rangers all got on a plane together and flew to a conflict zone definitely a lot of military flight allegedly the us government has never given out any further information about what might have happened leading some people to believe that it might have been a friendly fire incident after all and to be honest you're not going to want to readily confess to a mistake like that in another string to this theory's bow the tanker that witnessed the explosion tried contacting the nearest naval bases to report it but calls went unanswered there are apparently no historical documents about the plane in the travis air force bases archives and repeated requests for information to places like the cia national archives and the state department have fallen on deaf ears isn't that can't you do that thing the freedom of information request where you write and they have to give you the information i mean they can redact them out of it but uh they can still give the information oh my god i have a great story about redacting i mean a great interesting story for me i was looking at uh buying a property and across from the property there was like a like a development going on so i was like why is this for sale because they're going to be developing like some terribly ugly property across the street and so i go on to like the government website you know where they have all the things and they redact people's personal information i download the pdfs and you could just delete the redaction like you know the black lines over it they're digitally added and i was like so it flickered when i opened it or something and i was like wait did i just see that dude's name and then you could just you can't really delete it you could just drag the redacting to another page on the place on the page and i'm like government really official government website is this really what's going on so all of that is just out there and then i found out what they were doing because i googled the guy's name found out the company he was running and then saw what developments the companies were building the company was building and you're like oh okay and then i was like it seems really unlikely you're gonna get the planning permission to do that so i didn't end up buying the house anyway but uh yeah that was shocking i hope the cia is better at that or do i here's another tasty tidbit flight 739 was not the only flying tiger lion's line plane with military connections to have an accident on march the 15th 1962. [Music] but they didn't crash into each other there's no way conspiracy on the same day that flight 739 left travis air force base another plane left the same base at roughly the same time it was flying tiger lines flight 7816 also a lockheed l-1049h superconstellation all we know about this one is it was carrying secret military cargo which could be absolutely anything it was headed for a base in alaska and for some reason the pilot decided to try and land using his own judgment rather than the help of the control tower this ended in tragedy when he crashed the plane short of the runway and died in the ensuing fireball presumably taking the secret military cargo with him wait who lands a plane you don't have a choice like when you're coming into land i know this from my learning to fly if there's a tower you have to ask you can't just be like ah if it's a radio if it's uncontrolled airspace or an uncontrolled controlled airfield yeah talk to the other pilots on the same frequency and be like anyone around i'm coming in for a landing anybody hello and then you can land or you don't even have to tell the other pilots if you like living dangerously and putting people's lives at risk but you don't have to you should but if there's a tower you have to be like uh hello i'd like to land the rest of the crew managed to escape with minor injuries while this is most likely a coincidence the fact that the two planes from the same airline crashed on the same day and both were being used what would probably undercover military purposes stoked the rumor mill to the max it's just a coincidence guys pilot error was given for the cause of this other crash and although it's fun to speculate on conspiracy theories and the possible sabotage of two planes at the same time it does seem that this was human error and not unduly suspicious unless the pilot was an undercover soviet agent as it turned out 1962 was not a great year for lockheed super constellation despite the safety record flying tiger lines actually lost four of those planes that year didn't we start talking about this plane was reliable four in a year everyone was like boeing 737 max you lost two planes in six months this is insane and they're like no no four in a year 1960s it's cool super reliable you only lost four a miracle the two that we've covered plus one in december that crash due to the pilot having a suspected heart attack but also one in september that crashed into the sea after a triple engine failure reliable planes triple engine failure that does not speak much for maintenance checks does it although do please note that even with three engines out this plane did not explode also while 28 people on board died 48 managed to survive aftermath as previously mentioned the men lost in the disappearance of flight 739 were not given recognition by the government leaving the families left behind feeling abandoned and helpless it took until may 2021 almost six decades late for any sort of tribute to occur when non-profit organization wreaths across america erected a granite monument in columbia falls maine bearing the names of all the american soldiers and crew who lost their lives that's nice can't believe it took six decades yo american government you don't have to put them on the wall like the vietnam wall or whatever although maybe you should um but there should be a monument 60 something elite army people these are like people if you're an army ranger right that's you gay you know it's not like you join the military for however long it is and then you leave these are like your elite soldiers you spent a lot of money on them they've dedicated their lives and careers to this come on do better i don't think the south vietnamese people got recognized anywhere though hopefully there's a mention of them somewhere in the world maybe in south vietnam uh was it a deliberate act an accident or a mechanical failure maybe the plane was simply off course and ran out of fuel crashing somewhere in the vast expanse of the ocean never to be found and the fireball was just a total red herring in its report the civil aeronautics board stated a summation of all relevant factors tends to indicate that the aircraft was destroyed in flight however due to the lack of any substantiating evidence the board is unable to state with any degree of certainty the exact flight of n6921c if you recall that was the registration number of flight 739 due to the complete and total lack of any evidence the truth will never be known unless the remains of the plane manage to be discovered someday that doesn't seem likely however as all of the places on earth could have been the plane was near the mariana trench when it disappeared that is the deepest place in the world also james cameron's been there which is crazy whatever actually happens the loss of flight 739 takes it into the top 200 deadliest plane crashes in terms of lives lost and goes down as the worst tragedy ever involving a lockheed constellation aircraft so thank you katie for putting this together it was bombs right it was a bomb or a missile the russians blew it up allegedly the ussr sorry or uh the uh there was someone slipped a bomb on board that tank are just happening to see that same thing at the same time too much of a coincidence yeah like there's there's like the scale of coincidences right there's coincidences where i'm just like that's ridiculous like the meteor getting hit that's just insane the other plane crashing on the same day that's just a coincidence the coincidence of a tanker seeing an explosion and a plane coming out of the sky exactly where that plane was supposed to be that is on the side of coincidence that it's pushing very close to certainty something blew up that plane in my opinion that's what it's flight 739 sound off in the comments below if you're watching this on youtube if you're listening to this as a podcast please do consider leaving a review that would be wonderful good reviews warm my little heart and as always thank you so much for watching or listening and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Decoding the Unknown

Views: 367,855

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Id: bzat0j3JhJo

Length: 38min 10sec (2290 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 25 2022