On December 5th, 1945, five TBM Avenger planes, known as Flight 19, took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 2:10 p.m. with 14 crewmen and flew into history. It was a routine naval over water/bombing exercise similar to one completed a few hours earlier by another flight. This exercise was planned to give enlisted men advanced combat aircrew training. For reasons still not totally known, the planes and their crew disappeared without a trace never to be heard from again. A PBM mariner aircraft with a crew of 13 took off to search for the missing Avengers and was also never heard from again.
The training Flight 19 was on was called “Navigation Problem 1,” which involved the Avengers to negotiate a triangular course from Fort Lauderdale. The first leg was due east for 123 miles, then slightly north of northwest for 73 miles, crossing Grand Bahama Cay, before heading southwest for 120 miles back to base. On the first leg the Avengers would drop some bombs for glide bombing practice.
Each plane was to have consisted of one pilot and two crewmen but one crewman called in sick, later admitting he had had a premonition of danger. The instructor supervising the flight was Lieutenant Charles Taylor. Although an experienced Pacific Coast combat with more then 2,500 hours of experience, Taylor had only recently been placed in Fort Lauderdale and was unfamiliar with the area. Taylor also had a history of becoming lost in flight and had twice previously ditched two planes in the Pacific. Perhaps ominously, Taylor requested to be excused from leading Flight 19 just 45 minutes before taking off. No one knows why he made the request and the request was denied. The trainee pilots had little experience in Avengers but had trained in Fort Lauderdale and knew the area well.
The aircraft were routinely armed and filled with enough fuel for a minimum five hours of flying. As is customary on many training flights, one of the trainee pilots assumed the role of leader out front while Taylor rode shotgun at the rear. At 2:10 the Avengers took off in bright, sunny skies with moderate to choppy seas.
The base tower and other nearby aircraft monitored all radio conversations between the pilots and it is known that the glide bombing practice was completed successfully. There was no indication of a problem until just after the turn on the second leg of the flight. Indications were that Taylor believed the flight was lost and took over the lead of the flight. Later it would become apparent that Taylor was the only one who believed they were lost while the students believed they were exactly where they should have been.
At 3:45 p.m. the tower received a radio transmission from Taylor, who sounded confused and worried. “Cannot see land,” be blurted. “We seem to be off course.” The control tower personnel were puzzled, at first thinking Taylor was calling for landing instructions and then not understanding his transmission as visibility was good and the sun was a surefire guide to direction. What could possibly be preventing Taylor from seeing the sun? The tower asked Taylor for his position. Awaiting a response, tower personnel squinted looking out over the horizon for any signs of the Avengers. There weren’t any.
“We cannot be sure where we are,” Taylor called back. “Repeat: Cannot see land.”
Stormy weather was now beginning to hit the area that caused concern as it meant visibility would diminish quickly. After several more minutes Taylor radioed again, “I think we’re over the Keys but I don’t know how far down. Both of my compasses are down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale. Every gyro and magnetic compass on the planes is going crazy. Each one is showing a different reading.”
The senior flight instructor was on another training mission further south and joined tower personnel on the radio with assistance. He told Taylor to keep the sun on his port wing and fly up the coast to Fort Lauderdale, if he was certain he was in the Keys.
Ten minutes later contact from Flight 19 resumes, only it is not Taylor talking. “We can’t find west. Everything is wrong. We can’t be sure of any direction anymore. Everything looks strange, even the ocean. Everything is… can’t make out anything. We think we may be about 225 miles northeast of base. I don’t know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn.” After another delay the tower learns that Taylor handed over command to another pilot for no apparent reason.
The senior instructor called out to the man now talking on the radio, identifying himself as “Powers.” “What is your present altitude? I will fly out and meet you.” Powers responded, “I know where I am now. I’m at 2300 feet. Don’t come after me.” Not convinced, the senior flight responded, “Roger, you’re at 2300. I’m coming to meet you anyhow.” Minutes later, Powers called again: “We have just passed over a small island. We have no other land in sight.” How could he have run out of islands? How could he have missed the Florida peninsula if he was in the Keys?
The senior instructor was now more concerned then confused because Flight 19 could not have missed the Florida peninsula if they were in the Keys. Help was summoned immediately. In all, more than 20 land facilities were contacted to assist in the location of Flight 19. Merchant ships in the area were asked to be on the alert and several Coast Guard vessels were told to prepare to put to sea. But there were delays. Teletype communication with several locations was out and radio fixes were hampered by static and interference from Cuban broadcast stations.
The senior instructor was now having his own problems maintaining contact with Flight 19. “Your transmissions are fading. Something is wrong. What is your altitude?” From far away, Powers called, “I’m at 4500 feet.” At this point the senior instructor’s transmitter went out and he had no power to continue on the common frequency with the lost Avengers. Later the senior instructor would say, “As his transmissions were fading, he must have been going away north as I headed south. I believe at the time of his first transmission, he was either over the Biminis or Bahamas. I was about 40 miles south of Fort Lauderdale and couldn’t hear him any longer.”
At 4:56 p.m. Taylor was heard telling the other pilots, “Change course to 090 degrees for 10 minutes.” At approximately the same time, two different students were heard saying, “Dammit, if we could just fly west we would get home; head west, dammit.”
Lt. Taylor requested a weather check at 5:24, and at 6:04 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 6:20, 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 there was silence. Flight 19 was never heard from again.
Several aircraft were dispatched to search for the Avengers and guide them back if they could locate them. One of the aircraft was a PBM Mariner which took off at 7:37 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 they, too, were never heard from again.
Cruising off the coast of Florida, the tanker S.S. Gaines Mills was sailing through the dark night when it sent the following message, “At 1950 (7:50), observed a burst of flames, apparently an explosion, leaping flames 100 feet high and burning for ten minutes. At present we are passing through a big pool of oil. Stopped, circled area using searchlights, looking for survivors. None found.” Her captains later confirmed that he saw a plane catch fire and immediately crash, exploding upon the sea.
Nicknamed “the flying gas tank,” the PBM was a source of concern due to large amounts of gasoline stored in them. Despite posted rules and regulations, it is suspected, though never proved, that an unsuspecting crewman lit a cigarette causing gas fumes to ignite. No trace of wreckage or any bodies from the PBM have ever been located.
What about Flight 19? This much is certain. We now know that Taylor took the lead sometime after the turn north on the second leg, thinking that his students were on a wrong heading. We know that Taylor would not switch to the emergency radio frequency for fear of losing contact with his flight. We also know that there were strong differences of opinion between Taylor and the students about where they were. Taylor, familiar with the Florida Keys, with both compasses out and with evidently no concept of time, could very well have mistaken the cays of the northern Bahamas for the Keys and the water beyond for the Gulf of Mexico.
But the students, having flown the area before, appeared to know exactly where they were and it was not the Keys or the Gulf. The lead passed back and forth between Taylor and a student, and land was never reached as the flight zigzagged through the area north of the Bahamas.
Valiantly trying to keep his flight together in the face of most difficult flying conditions, Taylor made his plan: When any aircraft got down to ten gallons of fuel, they would all ditch together. When that fateful point was reached, we can only imagine the feelings of the 14 men of Flight 19 as they descended through the dark toward a foaming, raging sea and oblivion.
The most common theory is that the aircraft most probably broke up on impact and those crewmen who might have survived the crash would not have lasted long in cool water where the comfort index was lowered by the strong winds. This last element, while only an educated guess, seems to satisfy this strange and famous “disappearance.”
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. A 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.
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”.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 archeologist John Myer raised this wreck from the ocean floor, 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.
The disappearance of Flight 19, with its mysteriously failing compasses, led to establishing the lore of the Bermuda Triangle. Was there something more mysterious, more supernatural behind the disappearance of five airplanes and 14 crewmen? There is no proof to either support or contradict this.
Director Steven Spielberg offered a fictional explanation of the fate of Flight 19 in his 1977 classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. According to him the flight was not lost but “taken” by extraterrestrials. As the film opens the five Avengers are found in the desert in Mexico in perfect condition, able to start right up. At the film’s conclusion the crewmen exit the “mother ship” unaware that any time has passed and looking the same as they did the day they disappeared.
Only the 14 men lost know what really happened that fateful night. The rest is based on theories and conjecture. Most believe the remains of Flight 19 are resting somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, untouched in its watery grave for 66 years now, awaiting discovery.
