Flight 19: Five Navy Bombers Vanished. Then the Plane Sent to Find Them Vanished Too.

"I don't know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn."

That message came over a Navy radio frequency at around twenty to four on the afternoon of December 5, 1945, from a student pilot in a flight of five torpedo bombers somewhere off the coast of Florida.

Over the next two and a half hours, the leader of that flight would insist he was over the Florida Keys. He was not. His students would argue that they should fly west. They did not. The sun would set. The fuel would run low.

And then, sometime that night, all five planes and all fourteen men would vanish.

A few hours later, a flying boat with thirteen more men aboard took off to search for them. It disappeared too.

Twenty-seven men. Six aircraft. No wreckage ever confirmed.

This is Flight 19. And the real story is stranger, and sadder, than the legend.

The flight

In December 1945, World War Two had been over for only a few months. But the U.S. Navy was still training pilots, and Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale was one of the places it did that.

Flight 19 was a routine training mission. Five TBM Avengers, big single-engine torpedo bombers, each with a crew of two or three. Fourteen men in all.

The exercise was called Navigation Problem Number One. It was designed to teach pilots dead reckoning: finding your way over open water using only your compass, your speed, and a clock.

The route was a rough triangle out over the ocean and back.

First, fly east about fifty-six nautical miles to a group of shoals in the Bahamas called Hens and Chickens, and practice low-level bombing there. Then keep going east another sixty-seven miles.

Second, turn north, northwest, for seventy-three miles, passing over Grand Bahama Island.

Third, turn west, southwest, for a hundred and twenty miles, which should bring them back to the Florida coast just north of Fort Lauderdale.

Then land.

It was a two-hour exercise. These students had done similar flights before.

The leader

The flight leader was Lieutenant Charles Taylor.

Taylor was not a beginner. He had about twenty-five hundred hours of flying time, most of it in this same type of plane. He had flown combat missions in the Pacific as a torpedo bomber pilot from the aircraft carrier USS Hancock.

But he had only recently been transferred to Fort Lauderdale from Naval Air Station Miami, where he had been an instructor. He did not know the waters off Fort Lauderdale as well as he knew the ones off Miami.

The students under him each had around three hundred hours of flying, about sixty of them in Avengers.

The flight was scheduled to take off at a quarter to two. It left at ten past two, about twenty-five minutes late, because Taylor arrived late.

There was one more detail. The aircraft were missing their clocks. That was not considered a problem, because the crews were assumed to have their own watches. In a navigation exercise built around time and distance, it is a detail that has bothered people ever since.

The weather was described as favorable, with moderate to rough seas. Every plane had a full tank of fuel.

"Both of my compasses are out"

The first part of the flight went normally. Around three o'clock, one of the pilots asked permission to drop his last practice bomb, and got it.

Then, at around three-forty, another Navy pilot in the air nearby, Lieutenant Robert Cox, heard a strange radio call on the training frequency. A student pilot named Powers, saying, "I don't know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn."

Cox called out to them. He asked who was calling, so someone could help.

The answer came from Taylor. And what he said set the course for everything that followed.

He said both of his compasses were out.

He said he was sure he was in the Florida Keys, but he did not know how far down, and he did not know how to get back to Fort Lauderdale.

That was a serious problem. The Florida Keys are south and west of Fort Lauderdale. If Taylor was right, the way home was north and east.

But Taylor was almost certainly wrong. The Navy's investigation later concluded that the flight had flown its route correctly. The islands he saw below were probably the Bahamas, exactly where they were supposed to be. Home was west.

East, then west, then east

For the next two hours, the flight turned back and forth, and the radio conversation grew more desperate.

Cox offered to fly south to meet them. Ground stations tried to work out their position. Radio reception was poor. The training frequency had interference from Cuban radio stations, and contact kept breaking up.

At around four forty-five, Taylor announced a plan. "We are heading zero three zero degrees for forty-five minutes," he said, "then we will fly north to make sure we are not over the Gulf of Mexico."

He was still convinced he was near the Keys, and worried that flying west would take them out over the Gulf.

Ground controllers asked Taylor to switch to the emergency search and rescue frequency, where he would get clearer contact. He refused. He said he could not switch frequencies because he had to keep his planes together.

At least some of the students did not agree with him. Over the radio, an unidentified voice was heard saying, "Dammit, if we could just fly west we would get home. Head west, dammit."

Every Navy pilot was taught a simple rule. If you are lost off the east coast of Florida, fly west. You will hit land.

Taylor did turn west, for a while. Then he turned back east. Then west again.

At four minutes past six, he was heard saying the flight had not flown far enough east, and that they might as well turn around and fly east again.

By then, the sun had gone down.

"We all go down together"

By ten to six, radio stations on land had managed to get a rough fix on the flight's position. It was well north of the Bahamas and east of Florida. Out over open ocean.

The weather was getting worse. The sea was rough. Night had fallen. And the Avengers were running out of fuel.

The last clear transmission from Taylor came at around twenty past six. He told the other planes to close up tight. He said that unless they reached land, they would have to ditch. And he said that when the first plane dropped below ten gallons of fuel, they would all go down together.

An Avenger landing on rough seas at night would hit the water hard, and it would sink quickly. A crew would have only moments to get out.

After that, nothing more was heard from Flight 19.

The Mariner

The Navy launched a search.

At twenty-seven minutes past seven that evening, a PBM Mariner flying boat took off from Naval Air Station Banana River, near what is now Cape Canaveral. The Mariner was a big twin-engine seaplane built for long patrols and rescues over water. It had thirteen men aboard.

At seven-thirty, the Mariner made a routine radio call.

It was never heard from again.

At a quarter past nine, the crew of a tanker ship, the SS Gaines Mills, reported seeing flames shooting about a hundred feet into the air, burning on the water for about ten minutes. The captain steered toward them and searched, but found only oil and aviation fuel on the surface. No survivors.

Around the same time, the escort carrier USS Solomons reported that it had lost a radar contact at about the same location.

The most likely explanation is that the Mariner exploded in mid-air. Mariners had a reputation for fuel fumes building up inside the plane. The crews sometimes called them "flying gas tanks."

Thirteen more men were gone.

The investigation

Over the next days, the Navy carried out a massive search across the ocean. They found nothing from Flight 19. No wreckage. No life rafts. No bodies.

A Navy board of investigation met in Jacksonville and produced a report around five hundred pages long.

It concluded that Taylor had mistaken the Bahamas for the Florida Keys and led his flight northeast, out over the Atlantic, instead of home. It said he was not to blame for his compasses failing, but criticized his refusal to switch to the emergency frequency. And it concluded that the Mariner had been lost to an explosion.

Then Taylor's mother got involved. She argued that her son was being blamed unfairly for the deaths of his men, when no wreckage had ever been found to prove what happened. The Navy amended its finding. The cause of the loss of Flight 19 was officially changed to "cause unknown."

The planes that weren't Flight 19

Over the years, people have claimed to find Flight 19 again and again.

In 1991, a deep-sea expedition announced it had found five Avengers on the seafloor off Florida, sitting close together. For a moment, it looked like the mystery was solved.

It was not. When they read the numbers on the planes, they did not match Flight 19. In a later documentary, one of the planes was identified as an Avenger lost in 1943, two years before Flight 19, and its crew had survived. The wrecks were described as a random collection of separate accidents that happened to end up in the same area.

Other finds have been linked to Flight 19 and then ruled out, including a wreck in the Everglades that turned out to be a different Avenger that crashed in 1947.

The Navy trained thousands of pilots in Florida during and after the war, and many planes went down off the coast. There are a lot of Avengers on the bottom of that ocean. None of them has been confirmed as Flight 19.

What we still don't know

Flight 19 later became the centerpiece of the Bermuda Triangle legend. Books and films turned it into something supernatural. The Hollywood movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind even showed the planes turning up in the desert, untouched.

But the real record does not need any of that. It is a story about a few small decisions that went the wrong way. A late takeoff. Missing clocks. A leader who was sure he was somewhere he was not. A refusal to change frequencies. Students who wanted to fly west. A sun going down over a rough sea.

And a second crew who went out to look for them in the dark, and never came home either.

Fourteen men on Flight 19. Thirteen on the Mariner. Twenty-seven families who never got anything back.

Where do you think Flight 19 went down? And if Taylor had listened to his students and flown west, would they have made it home?