This weekend, in the Los Roques group of islands, off the coast of Venezuela, the plane of world famous fashion designer Vittorio Missoni disappeared. I think you've already heard about this on the news, but it's not about him, but about the area in which the plane went missing
The fact is that at the moment this is at least 15 cases of disappearance within Los Roques, which are beginning to be called the new Bermuda triangle … Until there were official explanations for the plane that disappeared on last Friday, which had six passengers and crew on board, including an Italian fashion mogul Vittorio Missoni, some say the "Curse of Los Roques" was the cause.
The name comes from a series of mysterious plane crashes and "disappearances" over the past decade or so between the Caribbean archipelago of Los Roques and Venezuela's capital Caracas, 140 km south, writes the Guardian. This inevitably leads to comparisons with the infamous Bermuda Triangle, an area between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico that has long had a reputation as the site of unexplained ship and aircraft disappearances.
To date, no wreckage from Missoni's plane has been found on the route from Los Roques to Caracas. The owner of a hotel on the islands said he last saw a plane - a twin-engined BN-2 Islander built in 1968 - entering a cloud chain. Meanwhile, the Missoni family said that this does not rule out the possibility that the plane was hijacked by local drug smugglers.
A Venezuelan civil aviation spokesman said the latest aircraft contact record points to a location 18 kilometers south of Los Roques. Since the mid-1990s, there have been at least 15 incidents in which small planes have crashed, disappeared, or declared emergencies while moving around the area.
In 2008, 14 people died when a plane was flying the same as Missoni's and it crashed at sea. But no debris was found, and only one body was identified. There are various explanations for the "action of the curse" - from pilot errors for unknown reasons to the release of methane hydrates from the bottom of the sea. Lack of evidence is only fuel for new speculation.
Other areas that have also become famous for unexplained disappearances include the Formosa Triangle, the Michigan Triangle, the Sargasso Sea, and the Devil's Sea off the coast of Japan. But Nick Wall, editor of Pilot magazine, says that pilots are a pragmatic people, and they don't get distracted by talking about 'triangles' and 'curses': “There is always some explanation for what happened - even if it takes many years to uncover the secret and get the answer.
Pilots prefer to focus on the things that really help them survive, such as fuel gauges, weather forecasts, and engine inspections. They are increasingly aware that there are previously unknown meteorological phenomena such as coastal wind shears and high-altitude waves that can lead to sudden turbulence. But here it is too early to say something with certainty about the reasons for this latest incident."
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