The whole world is talking about it right now, the disappearance of a state-of-the-art Boeing 777-200ER of Malaysia Airlines. On March 8, 2014 the Boeing was in route from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China when all of the sudden the plane disappeared above the China Sea. Since then, all contact was lost and more than 12 days after this incident, the world does not know where Malaysia flight MH370 is, or what happened with it.
What many people do not know is that Argentina had a similar mystery to deal with during the sixties.
On November 3, 1965 a Douglas DC-4 with tail number TC-48, a four-engine turboprop aircraft from the Argentine Air Force was heading from Howard, Panama to El Salvador when it disappeared in Costa Rican airspace. Unlike the Malaysian plane, the Douglas could send an emergency signal that was heard in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Pilots were reporting that both engines were on fire.
The aircraft was never found and all 69 officers on board died.
A huge risqué action led to nothing. The US Air Force and some SAR teams on the ground searched in and above the Costa Rican jungle while Nicaragua and Costa Rica searched at sea. The ships did find some life vests and some days later they found little pieces of the aircraft as well as uniforms, documents, money and a camera. The difficulty is that all these objects were found in different locations, so they never found the wreckage of TC-48.
The investigation of the crash was not done well in the eyes of the families, so many of them began their own investigations. In the end those investigations led to nothing. In December 1967, more than two years after the disappearing of the Douglas, the investigation was stopped. Still today we do not know what happened to the Argentinian version of MH370.
