Ghost Planes and Ships There seems to be a lot of so-called ghost ships turning up in some places. In this instance it is referring to empty ships, but not always. There is something puzzling going on in the waters of Japan and people have been trying to get an answer to this for a while. Sometimes North Korean fishing boats wash up on the Japanese beaches and they contain the bodies of the fishermen. There are several reasons this might happen like the lack of modern instruments and some claim they have to travel so far away they starve to death before they can get back. It is hard to imagine a fishing boat couldn’t even catch enough fish to keep the crew alive, but I guess it could happen if they are lost. I have to wonder if the crews are so scared to return empty or with a small number of fish, they would rather risk their lives. Knowing how brutal the government is in North Korea; I could see this happening. Some ships are used to sneak products into some area that some countries have forbidden. Sometimes crewless ships wash up on beaches. I think when this happens the crews have either escaped by smaller boats or they have been secretly captured or worse. There have been cases of ships being abandoned and just left to drift all over the ocean. Besides being called ghost ships they are sometimes called phantom ships. I would have thought you could make money scrapping them, but the owners must have had their reasons for not doing that, and probably it is too hard a job to find out who truly owns them. They could even be part of the drug trade. Even famous cruse ships are not immune to becoming ghost ships as evidenced by the cruse ship The Spirit of London. It had been sold several times and its name was changed when a Chinese company purchased it. They renamed it as the Ocean Dream. The ship was gigantic and not that old, having been built in the 1970s and sold to the Chinese in the early 2000s. The ship was found abandoned and capsized off the coast of Thailand. After an investigation it was found it had been released and was floating uncrewed all over the ocean for over 1 year. It was just about impossible to figure out who the owners were. It seems strange to me that there are still ghost ships floating around today. One of the strangest cases of an abandoned ship was that of the Mary Celeste. It is an old case, but one of the most famous because of the circumstances of the condition of the abandoned ship when found. The ship was found adrift without its crew. One lifeboat was missing but aside from that everything was in pristine condition including its cargo of barrels of alcohol. There was some water in the ships hold, but everything was intact. Food and eating utensils were set out and all the personal effects of the passengers and crew were untouched, but the compass was shattered. The ship was put back into service but a few years later the owner wrecked her trying to commit insurance fraud. There is a term in aviation known as a ghost plane. Contrary to what one might think it is, Europe had ruled if airlines wanted to keep their routes that had to fly scheduled flights even if they had no passengers. It is hard to imagine in this day and age a flight to anywhere which would be empty, but I guess it happens. Some people associate the term ghost plane with strange occurrences on planes. An example of this was a flight where the crew noticed a pilot who had died was sitting in a passenger seat and disappeared when approached. It turned out the company had been repairing their planes with used parts that were found to be serviceable from crashes. This plane had one of the parts which were installed from a plane where that pilot had been killed. Planes are being found underwater all over the world’s oceans. It seems we have the tools today to better zero in to areas where these crashed planes reside. Between sonar and radar, and using computers to mark the locations of where there is a suspected plane, the number of finds has increased. Even with this equipment some famous planes have never been located but have been searched for a long time. I am thinking of Flight 19. Five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers containing 14 pilots and crew took off on December 5, 1945 and headed over the Bermuda Triangle and were never seen again. Many searches have taken place but in the original search one of the search planes disappeared. Sometimes, one just can’t account for some strange events, although there have been many guesses on what could have happened and why the search plane disappeared. Getting back to ships, the most famous of all the ships which are said to be floating around the seas is the Flying Dutchman, and yet the so-called experts say the ship never existed and is just a figment of someone’s imagination. For a figment, the legend has been around a long time. The legend started in the 17th century and is said to be based on a ship which disappeared in 1641. The ship got caught in a storm and it is said the crew wanted to turn back, but the captain refused. The story states the Flying Dutchman can never sail into a port. When one thinks of ghost ships, they usually think about ships traveling on the ocean, but there is another area where ships sail and it is said to be very dangerous at times and that is the Great Lakes. Many ships have been lost there. The Great Lakes are so huge they contain 1/5th of all the fresh water in the world. They are so big they create their own weather and sometimes the storms are very bad and very dangerous. There is an estimate of lost ships which were sailing on the Great lakes and it is between 6000 to 10000. Add to this about 30000 lives lost. One of the most famous ships lost was the Edmund Fitzgerald, even a song was written about it. In World War two some Great Lakes ships were used as freighters and traveled the oceans.
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