In 2002, a South African businessman named Keith Erwin traveled to Miami to buy an airplane. He and his partners had secured a contract to deliver fuel to diamond mines in Angola, but at the time there was a civil war going on inside the country, so they needed an airlplane to deliver the fuel.
He had found a 25 year old Boeing 727 that had recently been retired from service with American Airlines. The plane was in good condition, but at the same time quite old, so the agreed purchase price was only $1 million, with a $125.000 down payment.
After the sale, Erwin and the crew he had hired to operate it, flew the plane to Luanda, the capital of Angola. The company that had hired Erwin was supposed to pay him $220.000 once the plane arrived in the country, but they refused to do this. Another problem was that the accommodations and the quality of life in Angola, were worse than expected. There was no electricity or running water in their apartment, and this caused two of the flight crew to turn right back around, and return to the US.
Since their first client had refused to pay, Erwin looked for another one, and suprisingly found one! Him and what was left over of his crew began flying for their new client. But over time one after the other crewmember eventually quit and returned home after experiencing the dangerous conditions of working in a warzone. Most of the airports they flew to had unpaved and broken runways, and on one occasion a 727 from a competing company crashed right next to the crew. This left Erwin all alone, and the plane ended up being operated by an Angolan crew.
Erwin still owed a lot of money on the plane and eventually picked up a tail, someone would follow him around constantly. Erwin thought that this tail worked for one of his partners and he would blockade his hotel room door every night by placing a chair under the handle. One night, nobody really knows who, but someone bribed the night clerk and obtained a key to Erwin's hotel room. Erwin scared off the intruder by yelling at him, but the next day he left the country for good.
The original owner from Miami, who had never been paid the full amount, hired someone called Ben Padilla to go to Luanda and repossess the plane. The problem though was that by the time Padilla arrived in Luanda, the 727 had been parked at the airport for a while with no one responsible for it, and by now the plane had gotten parking fees, fines, and needed a lot of maintenance to become airworthy again.
Padilla hired a local mechanic crew to fix it up, and after a few months of work, it was almost ready to be flown to Johannesburg in South Africa for a new client.
But on May 23rd 2003, the aircraft was powered on, taxied to the runway without contacting air traffic control, and took off. This departure was not scheduled and as far as anyone could tell, only Padilla and a mechanic were on board when it left, and a 727 typically needs three people to fly!
Everyone was confused by this, and since this was only a few years after 9/11 the US government took great interest in finding out what exactly had happened. The plane had enough fuel to fly 2400 kilometers, which means it could be almost anywhere within within central and Western Africa.
But it shouldn't be that hard to find an airplane. Everywhere it tries to land, its arrival will be logged and reported, and it's unlikely that someone could have bribed an entire airport or avoided radar detection, so what exactly happened to it?
There are a few theories out there as to what happened. Either the plane crashed somewhere, but there has never been any wreckage found, so it could only have crashed in the ocean, which was the direction it was seen leaving.
Or the plane landed at an unknown and unregistered airport somewhere, where it might have been used for illegal purposes or scrapped. But as of today not a single piece of evidence has been found that could tell us what actually happened to it.
The most accepted answer that people agree on is that Padilla and the mechanic were likely held at gunpoint by someone who forced them to steal the plane and take off.
It is truly one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history!
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this story!