Three engines and one spy

 



    The Mystery of the SABENA Cologne to Brussels flight


    by Gianclaudio Polidori (translated by Leonardo Pavese)

    On January 4, 1937, a Belgian SABENA’s Savoia Marchetti S.73 trimotor, registered OO-AGP, took off from Cologne, Germany, with destination Brussels, Belgium. There were ten passengers onboard, besides the crew.

    After about one hour flight time, the aircraft suffered an almost simultaneous failure of all three engines that forced the pilots to make an emergency landing.

The S.73 after the emergency landing 



    The official report showed nobody died or was injured, and stated that the aircraft was being repaired. But the damage was clearly considerable, to the point that the airplane never returned in service, and, on May 14, 1940, it was finally demolished to prevent it from being seized by the invading German forces. (According to other sources though, the S.73 was captured and demolished by the occupiers).



The recovery of the wreckage




    But there’s a mystery that compounds that strangeness of the simultaneous total engine failure suffered by the aircraft, which smells like sabotage. That is the mystery of Mr. Max Wenner, a British textile entrepreneur of Swiss origin, who was also a noted traveler and nature photographer. Wenner was suspected of being a British spy, and maybe also a German double-agent, who figured among the passengers of the SABENA flight. There were no traces of Mr. Wenner when the S.73 landed but, six days later, his body was found in the forest of Genk. The hypothesis was that he had fallen out of the airplane in a suicide or because he was pushed out. However, those theories do not square with the results of the autopsy which declared that he had asphyxiated during the fall – without explaining how a man could suffocate while falling from 4000 feet; and with the fact his clothes were in perfect condition and that it did not show any evidence of trauma, except signs of compression around his neck.

    Several decades later, new journalistic investigations appear periodically which, without getting to the truth, contribute to perpetuate the mystery of the SABENA’s S.73.


    This article appeared originally in Italian on the N. 142 issue of Ali Antiche magazine, which is a publication of the G.A.V.S., an Italian association for the preservation of the Italian aviation heritage.

    All you comments, as usual, will be greatly appreciated.

    Thank you,

    Leonardo Pavese

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