Flight 19

On the afternoon of 5 December 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in Florida on a navigation training exercise. The route took them east over the Bahamas, where they carried out practice bombing, then on a series of legs designed to return them to base. Fourteen men were aboard. The flight leader was Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor, an experienced instructor who had recently transferred to Fort Lauderdale from another base; the others were mostly trainees.

Some time after the bombing practice, radio messages picked up by other aircraft and ground stations revealed that Taylor believed both of his compasses had failed and that the flight was lost. He appears to have become convinced that they were over the Florida Keys, south-west of Florida, and he steered to reach the mainland accordingly. Other messages suggest that some trainees believed they should fly west. The formation stayed together under his lead as weather worsened and darkness fell.

Radio contact faded, and the flight was never heard from again. That evening, among the aircraft sent to search, a PBM Mariner flying boat left Naval Air Station Banana River with 13 men aboard. It too failed to return. A merchant ship, the SS Gaines Mills, reported seeing flames and burning on the sea surface at about the time and place where the Mariner might have been. A massive search over the following days found no trace of the Avengers or the Mariner.

The core evidence is the record of radio transmissions, preserved in the Navy’s investigation. It shows Taylor’s growing conviction that his compasses were wrong and that he was over the Keys, his attempts to find land, the discussion of which way to fly and the eventual decision to stay together and ditch when the first aircraft ran out of fuel. Radio direction-finding fixes obtained late in the flight suggested the formation was in fact north-east of the Bahamas, far out over the Atlantic.

The weather had deteriorated during the afternoon, with rising winds and rough seas. Avengers were heavy aircraft that would sink quickly after ditching. A night ditching in a rough sea, at an unknown position, would have left little chance of survival and few traces for a search to find. None were ever found.

For the Mariner, the merchant ship’s report of flames and an oil slick is the key evidence. PBM Mariners were known to carry a risk of fuel vapour accumulating in the hull, and an explosion is widely regarded as a likely explanation. In 1991, a search team looking for Spanish treasure found five Avengers on the seabed off Florida, prompting brief excitement. Examination showed they were not Flight 19, but other Avengers lost in separate training accidents.

The US Navy Board of Investigation initially attributed the loss of Flight 19 largely to Taylor’s navigational confusion and his decision to lead the flight in the wrong direction. Taylor’s family contested this finding, arguing that it unfairly blamed a man who could not answer for himself and that no one knew for certain what had happened. After review, the Navy amended its conclusion to state that the loss was due to causes or reasons unknown.

The amendment did not introduce any new theory. It reflected the fact that without wreckage the precise sequence could not be proven. Most historians accept the underlying explanation: an instructor who believed he was over the Keys led a formation further out into the Atlantic, the weather worsened, and the aircraft ran out of fuel and ditched at night. The Mariner’s loss is generally attributed to an in-flight explosion.

Flight 19 became famous through retellings. In a 1964 magazine article, writer Vincent Gaddis gave the name Bermuda Triangle to a region where, he argued, ships and aircraft vanished inexplicably, and Flight 19 was his centrepiece. Later books, notably Charles Berlitz’s 1974 bestseller The Bermuda Triangle, spread the idea further, sometimes embellishing the radio messages and describing calm weather and a sudden, strange disappearance. The film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 depicted the Avengers reappearing in a desert.

Researchers who returned to the primary records, most influentially Lawrence David Kusche in 1975, found that many popular accounts omitted the navigation confusion, the weather and the fuel state, and that some quotations attributed to the flight did not appear in the transcripts. Insurers and coast guard authorities have also said the region does not show an unusual rate of losses given the heavy traffic it carries. Supporters of the Triangle idea argue that official findings of unknown causes leave room for other explanations, but no evidence has been produced for anything beyond ordinary hazards.