Flight 19

At 2:10 in the afternoon on December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in Florida on a routine training mission.

It was a clear, mild day. The war had ended four months earlier. The planes were TBM Avengers, big, sturdy, single-engine bombers that had served all through the Pacific war. The fourteen men aboard were mostly trainees, learning navigation and bombing. Their flight was designated Flight 19.

The plan was simple: fly east over the Atlantic to a spot called Hens and Chickens Shoals in the Bahamas, practice dropping bombs, continue east, then turn north, then turn back west to Fort Lauderdale. It was a triangular route, about three hours long. Navy pilots flew it all the time.

Flight 19 never came back. Neither did one of the planes sent to look for it. Twenty-seven men disappeared that afternoon and evening, and not one of them, nor any of the six aircraft, was ever found.

The Flight Leader

The leader of Flight 19 was Lieutenant Charles Carroll Taylor, an experienced combat pilot who had flown in the Pacific. He had recently transferred to Fort Lauderdale from another base in Miami, and he was not familiar with the area over the Bahamas. Before takeoff, according to some accounts, he asked to be excused from leading the flight. His request was denied.

The other pilots and crew were trainees — Navy and Marine Corps aviators near the end of their training. Several had flown the same route before.

Lost

The first part of the flight seems to have gone as planned. The planes reached the shoals and practiced their bombing runs.

Then something went wrong.

At about 3:40 p.m., a Navy flight instructor flying near Fort Lauderdale overheard a radio transmission from Flight 19. Someone was asking another pilot for a compass reading. Then he heard Lieutenant Taylor say that both of his compasses were out, and that he was trying to find Fort Lauderdale. He said he believed he was over the Florida Keys, south of the Florida mainland.

The instructor, Lieutenant Robert Cox, radioed back and told Taylor to put the sun on his port wing and fly north up the coast to Fort Lauderdale. But Taylor was almost certainly wrong about where he was. Investigators later concluded that the planes were not over the Keys at all; they were east of Florida, over the Bahamas. If Taylor flew north or east, as he seems to have done, he was flying away from land, out over the open ocean.

The Long Afternoon

For the next several hours, radio operators along the Florida coast listened as Flight 19’s situation grew more desperate.

Taylor’s transmissions became confused. Some of the student pilots seemed to believe they should be flying west — toward land — and could be heard saying so. One of them said, “Dammit, if we would just fly west, we would get home.” But Taylor, as flight leader, kept changing course. The planes flew north, then east, then west. The weather worsened. Clouds rolled in. The sea below grew rough. Night was falling.

Radio contact was broken and weak. The radio stations on the ground struggled to get a fix on the planes’ position.

At about 6:20 p.m., Taylor was heard telling the other planes to close up formation, and that when the first plane ran out of fuel and dropped below ten gallons, they would all go down together.

Sometime after 7 p.m., the radio went silent.

The Rescue Plane

That evening, the Navy launched a massive search. Among the first aircraft sent out were two PBM Mariner flying boats, big seaplanes that could land on water to rescue survivors. One of them took off from Naval Air Station Banana River at 7:27 p.m. with thirteen men aboard.

A few minutes later, it disappeared too.

At about 7:50 p.m., the crew of a tanker ship, the SS Gaines Mills, saw flames shoot up from the sea, near where the Mariner should have been, and passed through a large patch of oil on the water. The Mariner was a notorious plane among pilots; its fuel fumes could build up inside, and it was nicknamed a “flying gas tank.” Investigators believe it exploded in the air.

No bodies or wreckage were ever recovered from the Mariner either.

The Search

Over the following days, the Navy, Coast Guard, Army Air Forces and civilian boats searched hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. They found nothing from Flight 19.

The Navy’s investigation initially blamed Lieutenant Taylor for becoming disoriented and leading his flight away from land. Taylor’s mother, who was devastated, refused to accept that her son was at fault. She hired lawyers and pushed the Navy to reconsider. In 1947, the Navy changed the official cause of the loss to “causes or reasons unknown.”

The Triangle

Flight 19 would probably be remembered only as a tragic training accident if it weren’t for what writers did with it in the following decades.

In the 1960s, magazine writers began linking the disappearance of Flight 19 to a series of other ships and planes lost in the waters between Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. One of them gave the area a name: the Bermuda Triangle. In 1974, a bestselling book by Charles Berlitz claimed that the triangle was the site of strange, unexplained forces — magnetic anomalies, time warps, even alien abductions. Flight 19 became the most famous “victim” of the Bermuda Triangle. It appeared, decades later, in Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the planes are found intact in the Mexican desert.

Researchers who have studied the case closely say there’s no need for any supernatural explanation. A disoriented flight leader in an unfamiliar area, faulty compasses or a mistaken belief about where they were, a decision to fly away from land, deteriorating weather, darkness and an empty fuel tank: tragically, that’s enough.

The Sea

Over the years, several groups have claimed to find Flight 19’s planes, either on the seafloor off Florida or buried in swamps. In each case, the wreckage turned out to be other planes — many Avengers crashed during training flights in the area during the war.

The ocean east of Florida is deep, and the Gulf Stream is powerful. Five Avengers that ran out of fuel and ditched at night in rough seas would have sunk quickly and could have drifted far from where they went down. They may never be found.