The 727 had been grounded at Luanda since March 2002, racking up more than $50,000 in unpaid airport fees while its owner, a U.S. company called Aerospace Sales & Leasing, struggled to find a use for it. The plan was conversion: strip the passenger seats, outfit it to carry diesel fuel, and lease it to Nigerian carrier IRS Airlines. Its registration may have been changed to 5N-RIR, possibly a fake number. For fourteen months, the jet sat in the equatorial heat, deteriorating. The FBI would later describe it as unpainted silver with a stripe of blue, white, and red, its passenger seats removed. An aging airliner that nobody seemed to want became, in a single evening, the subject of an international manhunt.

Shortly before sunset on May 25, 2003, two men are believed to have boarded the aircraft. Ben C. Padilla, an American pilot and flight engineer, and John M. Mutantu, a Congolese mechanic who worked as Padilla's assistant. Neither was certified to fly a 727, which normally requires a crew of three. An airport employee reported seeing only one person aboard. What happened next unfolded fast. The 727 began taxiing without contacting the tower. It maneuvered erratically, weaving toward a runway it had no clearance to use. Air traffic controllers called repeatedly. No response. Then the aircraft accelerated, lifted off with no navigation lights, turned southwest over the Atlantic Ocean, and disappeared from view. No distress call. No transponder signal. Nothing.

The disappearance triggered immediate alarm in post-9/11 Washington. The FBI, CIA, and State Department launched searches across Africa. A stolen airliner capable of carrying fuel was, in the minds of counterterrorism officials, a potential weapon. Padilla's sister, Benita Padilla-Kirkland, feared her brother had crashed somewhere in Africa or was being held against his will. Aerospace Sales & Leasing president Maury Joseph, who had inspected the aircraft just two weeks earlier, shared her suspicion that Padilla had been at the controls. But U.S. authorities looked harder at Joseph himself, noting his history of accounting fraud and suspecting the theft was tied to a business dispute or an insurance scheme. In July 2003, a possible sighting surfaced in Conakry, Guinea, but the State Department dismissed it. An extensive investigation by Air & Space Smithsonian magazine in 2010 interviewed everyone involved and still could not determine what had happened.

More than two decades have passed, and N844AA remains on the list of missing aircraft. No wreckage, no confirmed sighting, no resolution for the families of the men who may have been aboard. The case occupies a strange niche in aviation history, distinct from tragedies like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. This was not a commercial disaster with hundreds of passengers. It was a single aging jet, apparently stolen from a neglected corner of an African airport by one or two people whose motives remain unknown. Did it crash into the Atlantic within hours of takeoff? Was it flown to a remote airstrip and hidden? Was it a desperate act, a calculated theft, or something else entirely? Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, from whose runway the 727 launched itself into oblivion, continues to operate as Luanda's main international gateway, handling millions of passengers who pass over the same tarmac where a silver jet once sat idle, waiting for whatever came next.