Most mysterious plane incidents

Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle
On the afternoon of December 5th, 1945, six disappeared into thin air - and started the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. A training mission of five Navy Avenger planes, led by experienced flight instructor Charles Taylor, took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. An hour and a half into the mission, pilots reported that they had become disorientated and couldn't recognise landmarks below them and eventually crashed killing all 14 on board.  Weirder still, one of the planes sent out to look for the lost training mission also disappeared.

Star Dust and the mystery Morse code
When the BSAA Star Dust, a civilian version of the Lancaster Bomber, disappeared during a flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago on August 2nd, 1947, it left behind a great many unanswered questions. The plane never reached its destination, but the radio operator managed to send out one final cryptic morse code message - reading "STENDEC" -before it disappeared. Theories about what happened to the plane - and the meaning of the cryptic final message - have grown over the years, and include UFO attacks, sabotage. The Star Dust wasn't discovered until 50 years later.

The disappearance of the Star Ariel
Yet another BSAA plane, the Star Ariel, vanished during a flight from Bermuda to Jamaica on January 17th, 1949. It never reached its destination and the search for survivors of the 20 passengers and crew was abandoned on January 25th.

The Andes disaster of flight 571
A chartered Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying 45 passengers and crew crashed into the Andes mountains in bad weather. Of the 45 people on the plane, 12 died in the crash. 14 more died days after the crash. The remaining 16 passengers only survived by resorting to cannibalism, feeding on the corpses of their dead friends. They were not found until 72 days after the crash, when two passengers made a ten-day trek across mountainous terrain, eventually finding a Chilean travelling salesman who gave them food and alerted authorities. The story was immortalised in the 1993 film Alive.

Air France flight 447
An Airbus A330 from Rio to Paris carrying 288 passengers and crew from Rio to Paris vanished over the Atlantic in 2009. The final report into the crash suggested ice crystals obstructed tubes in the aircraft, causing the autopilot to disconnect. The crew attempted to recover from the problem, but failed and stalled, causing the aircraft to plunge into the ocean. 50 bodies were recovered from the sea in the months following the crash.The black box recorders of Flight 447 were eventually found in May 2011, along with a further 104 bodies. The bodies of 74 passengers still remain unrecovered.