Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle

A documented 1945 loss, the seed of the Bermuda Triangle legend

Flight 19 was five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale at 14:10 on 5 December 1945 for Navigation problem No. 1, a combined navigation and practice bombing exercise. It was a training flight, not a patrol, and the students were near graduation. The leader, Lt. Charles C. Taylor, had about 2,500 flying hours and a combat tour in the Pacific behind him; his student pilots had about 60 hours each in the Avenger. In all 14 men flew. The route ran east to Hens and Chickens Shoals in the Bahamas for low-level bombing, on east, north over Grand Bahama, and back.

At about 15:40 Lt. Robert F. Cox, an instructor in the air with another group, heard a student, Captain Edward Powers, say he did not know where they were. Then Taylor came on: both of his compasses were out, and he was sure he was over the Keys. For the next hours the flight turned east, then west, then east again as the weather got worse, and someone was heard urging that if they could just fly west they would get home. By 17:50 land stations had placed the flight within 100 nautical miles of 29°N 79°W, north of the Bahamas, and around 18:20 Taylor told his planes to close up and go down together when the first ran below 10 gallons.

A PBM-5 Mariner with 13 men took off from Banana River at 19:27 to search for them and was never heard from after a routine call at 19:30. That night the tanker SS Gaines Mills saw flames from an explosion and searched in vain through a pool of oil and aviation gasoline; the Mariner's fuel lines were known to leak, and a mid-air explosion is the most likely end. The search that followed was the biggest peacetime rescue effort to that time. The Navy alone ordered 248 planes into the air, and crews covered more than 200,000 square miles of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico without finding bodies or debris.

The Navy's 500-page report concluded that Taylor had mistaken small islands offshore for the Keys, then amended it to cause unknown, and in 1947 the Board for Correction of Naval Records cleared him after his mother, Katherine Taylor, filed her own investigation. In 1964 Vincent Gaddis's story The Deadly Bermuda Triangle, in Argosy, gave the region its name for the first known time. Every year the Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale Museum holds a memorial ceremony for the 27 men.