Flight 19
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Flight 19 was the designation of five US Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers which disappeared on a training exercise out of the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on December 5, 1945. The aircraft and 14 crew members were never found, and neither was one of the search planes, a Martin PBM Mariner which exploded [1] with the loss of 13 aircrew. U.S. Navy investigators concluded that Flight 19 became disoriented and ditched at sea when the aircraft ran out out of fuel [2]. Some questioned the explanation, doubts which helped develop the Bermuda Triangle legend.
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[edit] Mission, crew, and disappearance
The instructor supervising the flight was Lieutenant Charles Carroll Taylor. Although an experienced Pacific Theatre combat pilot with more than 2,500 flight hours, he had not long been at Fort Lauderdale and was unfamiliar with the area. The trainee pilots had little experience in Avengers, but had trained at Fort Lauderdale and knew the area well. Taylor had a history of becoming lost in flight, and previously had ditched two planes into the Pacific Ocean. [3]
Flight 19 was undertaking a routine over-water navigation/bombing exercise, similar to one completed a few hours earlier by another flight, to give the enlisted men advanced combat aircrew training. Called “Navigation Problem 1”, it involved the Avengers negotiating a triangular course from Fort Lauderdale. The first leg was due east for 123 miles, then slightly north of north west for 73 miles, crossing Grand Bahama Cay, before heading south west for 120 miles back to base. Just 56 miles into the first leg, the aircraft dropped bombs as scheduled on the Hens and Chickens Shoals, just south of the Grand Bahamas, and practiced strafing. [4]
The aircraft were routinely armed, pre-flighted and filled with enough fuel for a minimum five hours flying before leaving the naval air station at 14:10 local time when the weather was fine although the sea state was described as moderate to rough. As is customary on many training flights, one of the trainee pilots assumed the role of leader out front, and Taylor rode shotgun at the rear.
Radio conversations between the pilots were monitored by base and other aircraft in the area, and it is known that the bombing operation was completed successfully. Subsequent conversations indicated that shortly after making their turn on to the second leg of the flight plan, there were indications the aircraft were lost and Taylor took over the lead of the flight. It later became apparent that only Taylor thought they were lost, with the students disagreeing, believing they were exactly where they should have been.
Taylor radioed to a senior flight instructor flying in the area that he "thought he was over the Keys (sic)" but "did not know how far down", that both of his compasses were unserviceable, and that he did not know how to get to Fort Lauderdale. He was advised by the senior instructor to put the sun on his port wing and fly up the coast to Fort Lauderdale, if indeed he was certain he was in the Keys.
As the weather worsened, radio contact became more intermittent, and it is believed now that the five aircraft were actually by that time well out to sea east of the Florida peninsula. At 17:16, after a dispute with another flyer in the flight who was insisting (probably correctly, but too late due to Taylor's earlier misjudgement) that they fly west, Taylor radioed "We'll fly 270 degrees west until landfall or running out of gas".
In fact, even had they been where Lt. Taylor had believed them to be, in the Florida Keys, the answer to his problem since he was not certain, would and should have always been to turn west. A westward to northwest path, if confused as to whether he was in the Bahamas or the Keys, would have taken them eventually to landfall in both instances, from both locations. Had he been in the Florida Keys, a west to northwest path would at the very least brought him to the Gulf coast before the planes ran out of fuel. Had they been where they actually with all likelihood were, in the Bahamas, that west to northwest path would have brought them to the east coast long before fuel ran out. Due north or northeast should have never been an option he chose, and would ultimately prove to be the demise of Flight 19.
Lt. Taylor requested a weather check at 17:24, and at 18:04 radioed to his flight "Holding 270, we didn't fly far enough east, we may as well just turn around and fly east again". However in that transmission he was indecisive, and obviously not in command, because the transmission indicated more of an opinion than an order. In his last mostly decipherable message, at about 18:20, he was heard saying "All planes close up tight . . .we'll have to ditch unless landfall . . .when the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together." After that transmission, the flight fell silent. Nothing more was ever heard from Flight 19. [5]
At 17:50 several land based stations had triangulated Flight 19's position as being well off the coast of central Florida, but the weak radio reception and interference from radio stations in Cuba meant the pilots could not be reached to give them this information. By that time, bad weather was settling in, and visibility for the pilots would have worsened.
[edit] Search
Earlier, as it became obvious the flight was indeed lost, numerous air bases, aircraft and merchant ships were alerted. Several aircraft were dispatched to search for the Avengers and guide them back if they could locate them. One of the aircraft was the PBM Mariner, (PBM-5 Martin Mariner, Buno 59-225) which took off at 19:37 with a crew of 13 from Banana Beach Naval Air Station at Cocoa Beach, (now Patrick Air Force Base). The aircraft radioed a routine message to its base a few minutes later, but was never heard from again. It is most likely that it exploded roughly 13 minutes after takeoff. [6]
Aircraft and ships began what has been described as one of the largest and most rigorous searches in history. At 19:50 a tanker (S.S. Gaines Mills) reported seeing a mid-air explosion then flames leaping 120 ft high and burning on the sea for 10 minutes. The captain, Shonna Stanley, reported searching a sea of oil for survivors, but found none. The USS Solomons, also reported the explosion, in the exact same position an aircraft had disappeared off radar. The nickname for the Mariner was "the flying gas tank" due to fumes from the aviation fuel constantly leaking into the fuselage. [7]
Navy investigators spent months examining thousands of pages of testimony from people involved in any way with the disappearance of the Avengers and the Mariner. The board of enquiry concluded that the Avengers became lost and ditched into very rough seas after running out of fuel, and that the Mariner exploded in mid-air, probably when fuel fumes were ignited.
[edit] Hindsight
Had Flight 19 actually been where Taylor believed it to be, landfall with the Florida coastline would have been reached in a matter of 10 to 20 minutes or less, depending on how far down they were. However, a later reconstruction of the incident showed that the islands visible to Taylor were probably the bombing target, well east of the Keys, and that Flight 19 was exactly where it should have been. The Board of Enquiry found that because of his belief that he was on a base course toward Florida, Lt. Taylor actually did guide the flight further north-east and out to sea.
The fact that no wreckage has ever been discovered created a mystery for some people. A History Channel documentary noted that a pilot can easily mistake his location if he allows his imagination to get the best of him. According to the documentary, the most likely scenario was that Taylor incorrectly believed he was far off to the south-west Florida Keys, and turned the flight hard to the right, believing they would hit land.
The fact that very few searches have concentrated on the vast open ocean areas could explain why the planes have never been found. By the time the pilots turned west, they were likely so far out to sea that there was little hope of rescue, even if they had managed to stay afloat. [8] [9]
[edit] Another theory
The History Channel also postulated that the Avengers may have actually been where Lt. Taylor believed they were, and that they reached landfall and crashed in the Georgia swamplands. That theory has mostly been greeted with skepticism, as some wreckage would have been found by now, and as their radios were functioning they would have remained in contact with a base, which didn't happen. [10] [11]
[edit] Avenger wreckage
In 1981 the wreckage of five Avengers was discovered off the coast of Florida, but engine serial numbers revealed they were not Flight 19. They had crashed on five different days "all within a mile and a half of each other".[1]
In 1986, the wreckage of another Avenger was found off the Florida coast during the search for the wreckage of the Space Shuttle Challenger. In 1990, aviation archaeologist Jon Myer raised this wreck from the ocean floor. He was convinced it was one of the missing planes, but positive identification could not be made. In 1992 another expedition located scattered debris on the ocean floor, but nothing could be identified. In the last decade, searchers have been expanding their area to include farther east, into the Atlantic Ocean.
[edit] Bermuda Triangle connection
The disappearance of Flight 19 helped establish Bermuda Triangle lore. Charles Berlitz, author of various books on anomalous phenomena, attributed the loss of Flight 19 to anomalous or unexplained forces but there is no definitive evidence for that.
Important basic details are missing from Berlitz's story. The image of a squadron of seasoned combat aviators disappearing on a sunny afternoon with no adverse weather conditions is inaccurate. It was, rather, a squadron of lost, inexperienced flight trainees led by an experienced flight leader who unfortunately also had a past trait of getting lost himself and ditching planes due to his being lost.
The flight, contrary to popular belief, was forced to ditch their out-of-fuel aircraft into unknown stormy waters, at night. It is claimed that the Navy's original findings blamed the accident on Taylor, who had abandoned aircraft twice before in the Pacific after becoming lost when returning to his carrier, but the wording of this report was changed in deference to the wishes of his family. [12] Another factor was that TBM Avengers were not designed for crash-landing into water. Wartime experience in the Pacific theater had showed that an Avenger would sink very quickly if landed on the water. Especially with novice pilots at the controls, an Avenger would be very difficult to land on calm water, let alone the rough seas in the Bermuda Triangle or open Atlantic.
Much later, it was claimed that Taylor had been heard saying "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white". However, that is totally false, created some time around the early to late 1970s during the boom of interest in the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs. There were also reports during that time that one of the planes, identifying itself as a part of Flight 19, was heard in broken radio transmissions hours after the last plane should have ran out of gas. However, there is nothing to support that claim, either.
Although there are still many hardcore believers that the Bermuda Triangle played a part in Flight 19's disappearance, the general opinion is that the true mystery is not what happened but where did they ditch.
[edit] Trivia
- The fate of Flight 19 was a plot element of the 1977 science fiction movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
- Annually, on December 5th, the US Naval Station Ft. Lauderdale Historical Association holds a memorial for the lost pilots of Flight 19. [13]
- The NWOBHM band, Angel Witch, had a song entitled "Flight 19".
- The guitarist Buckethead has a song entitled "Flight 19", found on the album Bermuda Triangle.
- The English drum and bass artist Mark J has a song entitled "Flight 19", released as a 12" on the now defunct Good Looking Records label.
- In the TV miniseries The Triangle a Boeing 747 collides with a flight of Avenger torpedo bombers while traversing the Bermuda Triangle, probably Flight 19. All crash.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Dive to Bermuda Triangle (2004); telecast on The Science Channel, February 17, 2006
[edit] References
- "Lost Patrol", Naval Aviation News. June 1973, pp. 8-16; reported at U.S. Navy Historical Center FAQ
