| Flight 19 |
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Flight 19 was a flight of five legend. Mission, crew, and disappearance The instructor leading the flight was Lieutenant Charles Carroll Taylor , an experienced Pacific Theatre pilot but who 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. Flight 19 was undertaking a routine over-water navigation/bombing exercise, similar to one completed a few hours earlier by another flight. (The enlisted men in the aircraft were taking part in 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 Bahama s, and practiced strafing. The five aircraft making up Flight 19 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 the bombing operation was completed successfully. Subsequent conversations indicated that shortly after turning to port on to the second leg of the flight plan, Taylor had taken over the lead of the flight after there were indications the aircraft were lost. 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 to put the sun on his port wing and fly up the coast to Fort Lauderdale. A later reconstruction of the incident showed that the islands in question were probably their bombing target, well east of the Keys. The Board of Enquiry alleged prejudicially against Taylor that in his erroneous belief that he was on a base course toward Florida, he actually guided the flight further north. Meanwhile as the weather worsened and radio contact became more intermittent, the five aircraft were in fact well out to sea east of the Florida peninsula. At 17:16 Taylor said he was flying west and would do so until landfall or running out of gas. He requested a weather check at 17:24 and at about 18:20 in his last decipherable message, he was heard asking his colleagues to close formation. He informed them they would need to ditch unless reaching land, and advised them that when the first plane dropped below 10 gallons of fuel they would all descend together. Nothing more was heard from Flight 19. 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. 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-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 because it exploded 13 minutes after takeoff. At 19:50 a tanker reported seeing a mid-air explosion then flames leaping 120 ft high and burning on the sea for 10 minutes. The captain 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. 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. Aircraft and ships carried out what has been described as one of the most rigorous searches in history, but no trace of aircraft or crews were ever located. In 1981 the wreckage of five Avengers was discovered off the coast of Florida, but it was found later from serial numbers on engine blocks that they were not Flight 19. The five Avengers had crashed on five different days "all within a mile and a half of each other".''Dive to Bermuda Triangle'' (2004); telecast on The Science Channel, February 17 , 2006 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 located and 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 that may have come from an Avenger but nothing could be identified. Bermuda Triangle connection The disappearance of Flight 19 has long been associated with the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Charles Berlitz , a popular author of various books on Anomalous Phenomena , attributed the loss of Flight 19 to anomalous or unexplained forces. Whereas the USN Board of Enquiry's evidence and conclusions taken at face value seem to indicate the prosaic explanation of flight leader error, it is in what the findings were careful to omit that the true mystery resides. These questions can be summarized as follows: (1) In his deposition, a USN colleague of the flight leader reported that Carroll had said: "I am over the Keys but I do not know how far down." The Board of Enquiry accepted that by "the Keys", the flight leader meant "the Florida Keys" and he was thus disoriented. The Enquiry gave no consideration to the fact that "the Cays" and "the Keys" sound similar, and that in this connection Lt Carroll was actually performing a navigation and bombing exercise over the Cays, i.e. the Bahama Cays. In the prevailing conditions on that day, he could not possibly have been "lost" over the Florida Keys, since he would have been able to see the mainland. On the other hand, if to his astonishment he had discovered himself to be over the long chain of the Bahama Cays, that would account for his comment that he "was over the Cays but did not know how far down." (2) At the end of the Second World War, the US coastal stations had a sophisticated radar and radio location network. This had been so precise in 1945 that the position of a U-boat signalling far out to sea could be pinpointed within seconds. Whereas the East Coast shore stations were at all relevant times over a six hour period in radio comunication with Flight 19, it was found impossible to take a bearing on the transmissions and so triangulate the flight's position. This mystery was never addressed by the Board of Enquiry. Similarly, no radar fix was obtained. The principal reason for the belief that no "prosaic explanation" exists for the loss of the five Avenger aircraft, and that an anomaly involving abnormal forces was responsible for the disaster, lies in the inexplicable failure of all coastal radio and radar stations to establish the position or bearing of the aircraft throughout the episode. The fate of Flight 19 was a plot element of the 1977 science fiction movie '' Close Encounters Of The Third Kind ''. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal band, Angel Witch, had a song entitled "Flight 19". The guitarist Buckethead has a song entitled "Flight 19", found on the album ''Bermuda Triangle''. Footnotes References
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