Stardust in my eyes

By F.G.Helmke
The following experience shows how typical human behavior often leads to disastrous results: highly trained experts are convinced they know what they are doing.
“A British airliner called Stardust took off on a routine passenger flight across South America. The scheduled British South American Airways flight should have taken under 4 hours to travel from Buenos Aires in Argentina to the Chilean capital Santiago across the Andes mountains. No plane was better suited for crossing the Andes than this one.”
Typical routine. Reliable men, excellent machines.
“At 5pm Stardust radioed its position near to Mendoza. The crew could still see the ground, but ahead the mountains were covered in cloud.”
So far everything went according to plan. But “the flight was to be anything but routine.”
“Just before Stardust was due in Santiago the plane contacted air traffic control. At 5.33 it confirmed it was due to arrive in just 4 minutes. Confident they had crossed the mountains they radioed their time of arrival.”
Then the airplane disappeared. No wreckage was found, the incident remained a mystery.
“It was found 53 years later on a glacier below one of the biggest mountains in the Andes, Mount Tupangato, 50 miles from Santiago.  Research shows that Stardust had obviously been close to landing before it disappeared.
 “The crew was convinced they were crossing the mountains into Chile, but they weren’t. At 5.33 on August 2nd 1947, when they radioed their time of arrival as 5.45, the plane was in fact still on the wrong side of the mountains” and instead of approaching Santiago the aircraft crashed into a glacier.
 “Stardust had told air traffic control that it intended to climb to 24,000ft avoiding the bad weather. From now on the ground was invisible beneath the clouds. On its own bad weather didn’t explain the crash, because its ability to fly high should have guaranteed safety.
“Although they didn’t know it, by trying to fly over the tops of the mountains they were sealing their fate. They were about to encounter an invisible meteorological phenomenon which they knew nothing about: the “jet stream”. This powerful, high altitude wind only develops above the normal weather systems. It blows at speeds of well over 160 km an hour from west to east around the earth, but in 1947 very few planes ever flew high enough to encounter the jet stream, so the phenomenon itself was still largely unknown.
“As Stardust climbed it began to enter the jet stream and slow down dramatically, but the crew had no knowledge of this.
“The jet stream’s effect was devastating. Confident the Andes were well behind them, the pilot, Reginald Cook, began the descent, sure that when Stardust emerged from the clouds it would be above Santiago airport. In fact they were descending straight towards Mount Tupangato which was still invisible in the clouds ahead. Disaster was seconds away.
“Hopelessly off course because of the jet stream Stardust flew straight into the cloud-covered glacier. It crashed in the upper area where the plane was buried and became part of the glacier.
“After the devastating crash Stardust was buried within seconds. It vanished from sight. The wreckage was swallowed by the glacier. For the next 53 years   the wreckage travelled downhill inside the glacier towards  the lower rock-covered section until it reached the glacier’s zone of melting. Now, finally it is beginning to melt out onto the surface. The mystery of what happened to Stardust is almost over.
“Because we have the weather charts today, and because of the way the jet stream develops, we can say that on the day of the crash conditions were ideal for the jet stream to occur. But the flight crew had absolutely no knowledge of it at all, because in those days nothing was known about this type of phenomenon.

“Analysis of the old weather charts showed that on the day of the crash Stardust was flying straight into the jet stream, which was blowing at around 100 miles an hour, but crucially the clouds meant that the crew was unable to see the ground which would tell them where they were, so they had no way of knowing that the jet stream was slowing them down, destroying all their navigational calculations.
 “The propeller [found on the crash site] shows that this engine was working normally before the crash. Every piece of wreckage is crushed and crumpled, the signs of a massive high speed impact. This pattern of wreckage is exactly what would be expected if the plane flew straight into the glacier. There appears to be no reason for the plane to have crashed. The picture is of a plane apparently flying normally right up to the final moment.”
Everything seemed totally normal, until the sudden end. I am sure that the Stardust crew was much more reliable than the captains of the Titanic or the Costa Concordia, and that’s exactly what scares me. Confident professionals who think they know exactly what they are doing are not even aware that they are maneuvering the world into the unknown. Sure we know much more than we knew in 1947, but let’s face it, if you compare the little we know with all we don’t know, we are actually just as ignorant as our ancestors hundreds of years ago. And worst of all, we think we know so much that we often behave as if we knew it all.
History and experience show that even little unknown details can make a very big difference. It reminds me of the lentils I cooked a few years ago in a pressure cooker. I had left some space on top of them so they could expand, just as with the beans we were cooking almost daily. A while later when I was working in the garden with my friend we heard what seemed to be a car crash on the street. We went to see what had happened. When we passed by the kitchen we realized that the pressure cooker had exploded. It had devastated our stove, its top had become a big hole. The floor, the walls and the ceiling were covered with lentils. Thank God I had my face in the garden and not over the stove when it happened. I know now that lentils seem to expand a little more than beans, just as modern airline pilots now know about the jet stream.
So what exactly is the mistake we often make? We rely on logical thinking and respond automatically while we unconsciously venture into the unknown. We don’t even realize we are messing with unknown factors. Whether we are highly trained professionals, characters like those famous captains, or simple cooks, we are human and therefore make mistakes because we forget too often that we don’t know it all.
I had an incredibly interesting experience that convinced me that this doesn’t necessarily have to be so. For several years I learned many lessons about this kind of behavior and how to avoid these mistakes. I lived with a wonderful woman who had a certain habit which in the beginning often drove me crazy. I am a down-to-earth practical personality, always planning, thinking and analyzing. She is different, and she would often change our plans. All of a sudden she’d say, “let’s do it differently”, and start going in a totally different direction. While I was running on plans and logic she would rely on intuition.
I got used to it and actually came to a point where instead of just going ahead I would start asking, “what’s the latest change of plans?”
There is a very good reason why I finally changed my attitude. Over the years I found out that every time I insisted on having my way things went wrong. Every time I gave in to follow her instead things worked out. Recalling all these incidents I can easily prove by statistics that her intuition was usually right, and my seeming logic was often wrong.
So the good news is that there actually exists a way of avoiding these kinds of disaster. Stardust, Costa Concordia, Titanic, all these disasters would not have happened if the responsible men had listened to someone like this woman or, even better, to their own intuition.
The big question is: where did she get this intuition from? The wonderful thing is that there’s no big secret, nothing earth shaking. Different from most of us she had a certain habit that she had developed over the years, she would get up early before everybody else and then spend time in prayer. She told me she didn’t dare start a day without being sure she was connected to God.
Unfortunately our world is run by people like me who heat up the world the same way I heated up my lentils, who steer their countries, companies, schools or families like the pilots of the Stardust or like certain captains.
We enter the future almost blindly, we can actually only assume what lies ahead from experience, but we don’t really know. We are conditioned to do so because of the simple fact that we are mortal men and don’t know it all. And what’s worse, often we know that we are probably not doing the right thing, but we ignore those voices that tell us that our path might lead to disaster.
Unconsciously we venture daily into the unknown, but how can we let intuitive answers enter into our consciousness? I and many others have seen plenty of evidence that by simply taking a little time to pray each day we can develop the ability to change course when needed. Doing the right thing at the right moment, even without knowing why.
That’s why men get lost easier than women. Women “feel” they are lost and ask the way, while men prefer to just go on. Thank God prayer and intuition is not limited to women. I know plenty of men who escaped a bad deal not knowing why they made a certain decision, it just didn’t “feel” right.
Yes, we don’t know it all. We can’t foresee the future. We are in the dark about most things. So let’s not be too sure we know what we are doing when we are actually walking in the dark.
We are born imperfect, but that’s okay because we are also born with the ability to connect with an all-knowing God. Just like in spite of the dark we can see the whole picture during a short lightning, by touching God for a moment we can make sure we are going the right way.

 *all quotes courtesy of BBC2, November 2, 2000: Vanished: The Plane That Disappeared