corrente

Just in case you were sleeping too well this week....

I first saw this story months ago and had pretty well forgotten it. Planes go missing sometimes after all. Africa's a big place. Somebody's always trying to arrange a military takeover, or smuggle animals, vegetables or minerals, whatever.

Then this story of the looted Iraqi explosives hits, and what do you know, by sheer coincidence this missing plane story surfaces again, just because a local guy from Florida is missing along with it.

(via St. Petersburg Times)

In May 2003, Ben Charles Padilla got a disturbing e-mail from a brother in Pensacola: Their mother had suffered a heart attack.

Padilla e-mailed back that he would call as soon as he could get to a phone. Relatives didn't hear from him again, but at first they weren't concerned. After all, he was 7,100 miles away in the African nation of Angola.

For several weeks before, the 50-year-old pilot and aircraft mechanic had been at Angola's main airport overseeing refurbishment of an aging Boeing 727. The plane had been parked so long that observers were surprised when, shortly before sunset on May 25, Padilla and another man climbed on board, revved up the engines and taxied out.

Witnesses were even more surprised to see the plane swerve back and forth, as though someone were wrestling for the controls. Then, with no flight plan or contact with the tower, the big jet roared down the runway and took off.

Did it disappear as the result of an insurance scam or garden-variety theft, only to resurface in another Third World county with a new paint job and registration number?

Or did something more sinister happen, as Padilla's family and others fear? Could the 727 - which had been retrofitted to carry tons of extra fuel - been hijacked by terrorists for use in a 9/11-style attack?

"In spite of months of searching and following up on several false leads, neither Mr. Padilla nor the plane has ever been located," a State Department official recently wrote.

"There has never been any evidence that would give us a clue as to what happened to Mr. Padilla. Given the efforts to date and the time elapsed since his disappearance we sincerely regret that we cannot offer more hope about his whereabouts."

Sweet dreams.