It began as nothing more than a routine training flight. At 2:10 p.m. on December 5, 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers took off from a naval air base at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The planes, collectively known as “Flight 19,” were scheduled to conduct a three-hour exercise known as “Navigation Problem Number One.”
Their triangular flight plan called for them to head east from the Florida coast and conduct bombing runs at a place called Hens and Chickens Shoals. They would then turn north and fly over Grand Bahama Island before changing course a third time and flying southwest back to base. Except for one plane carrying only two men, each of the Avengers was crewed by three Navy or Marine men, most of whom had logged about 300 hours in the air. The flight leader was Lt. Charles C. Taylor, an experienced pilot and veteran of several combat missions in the Pacific theater of World War II.
At first, Flight 19 proceeded as smoothly as the previous 18 flights of the day. Taylor and his pilots flew over Hens and Chickens Shoals around 2:30 p.m. and dropped their practice bombs without incident. But shortly after the patrol turned north for the second leg of its journey, something very strange happened. For reasons that remain unclear, Taylor became convinced that his Avenger’s compass was malfunctioning and that his planes had been flying in the wrong direction. The problems only increased after a front moved in, bringing rain, gusty winds, and heavy cloud cover. Flight 19 became hopelessly disoriented. “I don’t know where we are,” one of the pilots radioed. “We must have gotten lost after that last turn.”
Compass failure and crash landing
Lt. Robert F. Cox, another Navy flight instructor flying near the Florida coast, was the first to hear the patrol’s radio communications. He immediately informed the Air Station of the situation and then contacted the Avengers to ask if they needed assistance. “Both of my compasses are out of order and I’m trying to find Ft. Lauderdale, Florida,” Taylor said, his voice anxious. “I’m over land, but it’s out of order. I’m sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how deep.”
Taylor’s claim didn’t seem to make sense. He had made his scheduled pass over Hens and Chicken Shoals in the Bahamas less than an hour earlier, but now believed his planes had veered hundreds of miles off course and ended up in the Florida Keys. The 27-year-old had just flown to Fort Lauderdale from Miami, and many have since speculated that he might have mistaken some of the islands in the Bahamas for the Keys.
ACEY HARPER/GETTY IMAGES AERIAL OVERVIEW OF NAVAL AIR STATION FORT LAUDERDALE THE ORIGIN OF “FLIGHT 19.”
Under normal circumstances, pilots lost in the Atlantic would point their planes toward the setting sun and fly west toward the mainland, but Taylor was convinced he might be over the Gulf of Mexico. Hoping to locate the Florida peninsula, he made the fateful decision to steer Flight 19 northeast, a course that would only take them farther out to sea. Some of his pilots seemed to have realized he was making a mistake. “Damn it,” one man complained over the radio. “If we flew west, we’d make it home.”
Eventually, Taylor was persuaded to turn around and head west, but shortly after 6 p.m., he appears to have canceled the order and changed direction again. “We didn’t go far enough east,” he said, still worried about the possibility of being in the Gulf. “We might as well turn around and head east again.” His pilots likely argued against the decision—some investigators even believe one plane broke off and flew in a different direction—but most followed their commander’s lead. Flight 19’s radio transmissions soon grew increasingly weaker as it meandered toward the sea. As fuel began to run low, Taylor was heard preparing his men for a possible crash-landing in the ocean. “All planes, come in,” he said. “We’ll have to ditch unless we hit land…when the first plane gets down below ten gallons, we’ll all go down together.” A few minutes later, the Avengers’ last radio communications were replaced by a strange hum of static.
The search gives no results
The Navy immediately sent search planes to look for the missing patrol. Around 7:30 p.m., a pair of PBM Mariner seaplanes took off from an air station north of Ft. Lauderdale. However, just 20 minutes later, one of them appeared to track Flight 19 by suddenly disappearing from radar.
The wreckage of the Mariner and its 13 crew members was never recovered, but the seaplane is believed to have exploded shortly after takeoff. Seaplanes were notorious for being accident-prone, and were even nicknamed “flying gas tanks” for their propensity to catch fire. Suspicions that the seaplane may have burst into flames were all but confirmed by a passing merchant ship, which sighted a fireball and found evidence of an oil slick in the ocean.
PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES A MARINER MARTIN PBM SUSPENDED FROM A SHIP’S STER CRANE.
At dawn the next day, the Navy sent more than 300 ships and planes to search for Flight 19 and the missing Mariner. The search party spent five days combing more than 300,000 square miles of territory, without success. “They just disappeared,” Navy Lt. David White later recalled. “We had hundreds of planes searching, and we searched on land and water for days, and no one found the bodies or any wreckage.”
A Navy board of inquiry was also stumped. While it held that Taylor might have mistaken the Bahamas for the Florida Keys after his compass failed, it could find no clear explanation for why Flight 19 had become so disoriented. Its members ultimately attributed the loss to “unknown causes or reasons.”
Trying to explain the mystery of Flight 19
The strange events of December 5, 1945 have given rise to all sorts of wild theories and speculations. In the 1960s and 1970s, pulp magazines and writers such as Vincent Gaddis and Charles Berlitz helped popularize the idea that Flight 19 had been swallowed up by the “Bermuda Triangle,” a section of the Atlantic supposedly known for its high number of strange disappearances and mechanical failures. Other books and fictional depictions have suggested that magnetic anomalies, parallel dimensions and alien abductions might have played a role in the tragedy. In 1977, the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” showed that Flight 19 had been swept away by flying saucers and then deposited in the deserts of Mexico.
Even if the “Lost Patrol” did not fall victim to the supernatural, there’s no denying that its disappearance was accompanied by plenty of oddities and unanswered questions. Perhaps the strangest of all concerns Lt. Taylor. Witnesses later claimed that he arrived at Flight 19’s pre-exercise briefing several minutes late and asked to be excused from leading the mission. “I just don’t want to take this one out,” he allegedly said. The exact reason Taylor attempted to stop flying remains a mystery, but it has led many to suggest that he may not have been fit for duty.
There is also no explanation for why none of the Flight 19 crew used the rescue radio frequency or the ZBX receivers on their planes, which could have helped them reach Navy radio towers on the ground. The pilots were told to turn on the devices, but either did not hear the message or did not acknowledge it.
What really happened to Flight 19? The planes most likely ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean somewhere off the coast of Florida, leaving survivors at the mercy of rough seas and deep waters. In 1991, a group of treasure hunters seemed to have finally solved the puzzle when they stumbled upon the watery graves of five World War II Avengers near Fort Lauderdale. Unfortunately, the hulls were later found to belong to a different group of Navy planes whose serial numbers did not match those of the legendary “Lost Patrol.”
Many believe the wreckage of Flight 19 and its doomed rescue plane may still be lurking somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, but although the search continues to this day, no definitive sign of the six aircraft or their 27 crew members has ever been found.
