Searching for the River of Wind
In August of 1947, the Stardust fired up its engines in Buenos Aires for an afternoon flight to Santiago. The scene resembled something from a Graham Greene novel: A hulking piston-engined airliner thundering aloft in an exotic austral city, while a small and mysterious cadre of passengers adjusted their seatbelts in the cabin. Among them were a German widow with her husband’s ashes, a Palestinian carrying a hidden diamond, and a British Foreign Service courier—a “King’s messenger”—on some opaque mission for the crown. The air route from Buenos Aires to Santiago runs west for about 700 miles, crossing the South American coastal plain before hopping over the Andes to the Chilean capital. In terms of geography, a trip from Denver to San Francisco would be a rough northern analog. The journey of the Stardust passed that day under seemingly routine circumstances, and about four hours after takeoff the crew radioed air traffic control to report their imminent arrival at Santiago. That was the last anyone saw or heard of them until 1998, when a group of climbers came upon the plane’s wreckage melting slowly out of an Andean glacier, some 50 miles east of her destination.
Jet streams are often portrayed as smooth roads, but they’re really more like braided rivers.
By then, the last flight of the Stardust had taken its place among the great unsolved
