At 2:10 p.m., five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers
comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in
Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. Flight 19 was scheduled to
take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a
final 120-mile 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
fliers, a distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard at
6:20 p.m., apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft
simultaneously because of lack of fuel.
By this time, several land radar stations finally determined
that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the Florida
coast, and at 7:27 p.m. 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 underway. The Mariner was never heard from again. Later,
there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of a visible
explosion seen at 7:50 p.m.
The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the 13 men
of 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. No trace of the bodies or aircraft was ever found.
Although naval officials maintained that the remains of the
six aircraft and 27 men were not found because stormy weather destroyed the
evidence, the story of the “Lost Squadron” helped cement the legend of the
Bermuda Triangle, an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and aircraft are
said to disappear without a trace. The Bermuda Triangle is said to stretch from
the southern U.S. coast across to Bermuda and down to the Atlantic coast of
Cuba and Santo Domingo.
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