May 25, 2003.

Luanda and Gola

50-year-old Ben Charles Padilla, an American citizen overseeing a rebuilding project on a Boeing

727 at Quadro de Peverero International Airport, is reportedly seen boarding the plane alongside

a Congolese mechanic named John Mikhail Mutantu.

Shortly thereafter, the aircraft takes off without clearance and disappears.

This neither Padilla or Mutantu seem to have the necessary training required to fly a 727.

The respeculation they may have been hijacked or that another person was behind the controls,

but no trace of the two men or the missing aircraft is ever found.

For that, the trail went cold.

Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of The Trail Went Cold.

I'm your host Robin Warder, and today we're going to be exploring a truly unique mystery

involving a missing plane and two men.

The 2003 disappearances of Ben Charles Padilla and John Mikhail Mutantu.

I once featured this story in an article I co-wrote at Crack.com several years ago,

and it's most definitely the first time our podcast has ever covered an unsolved cold

case from the African country of Angola.

But the story wound up receiving quite a bit of attention from the media because Ben

Charles Padilla was an American citizen, and given that this was less than two years

removed from 9-11, there was genuine fear that the missing aircraft might be used for

some sort of terrorist attack.

The reason Padilla became involved in this whole thing was because he was offered a contract

...