Today in History: Aircraft squadron gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle
No trace of the bodies or aircraft was ever found.
On this day in 1945, at 2.10pm, five US Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 took off from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission, never to be seen again.
Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for 193km, north for 117km, and then back over a final 193km leg that would return them to the naval base. They never returned.
Two hours after the flight began, the leader of the squadron, who had been flying in the area for more than six months, reported that his compass and back-up compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The other planes experienced similar instrument malfunctions.
Radio facilities on land were contacted to find the location of the lost squadron, but none were successful. After two more hours of confused messages from the flyers, a distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard at 6.20pm, apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft simultaneously because of lack of fuel.
By this time, several land radar stations had finally determined that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the Florida coast, and at 7.27pm a search and rescue Mariner aircraft took off with a 13-man crew. Three minutes later, the Mariner aircraft radioed to its home base that its mission was under way.
The Mariner was never heard from again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of an explosion seen at 7.50pm.
The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the 13 men on the Mariner led to one of the largest air and seas searches to that date, and hundreds of ships and aircraft combed thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and remote locations within the interior of Florida.
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