“Over the decades theories as to the cause of the disaster have emerged, with proponents referencing wholly invented portions of the official record devised to make this strange event even more mysterious.”

By Steve MacGregor

THE GROUP of five Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers that vanished during a routine training mission in 1945, known as Flight 19, is one of the most enduring aviation mysteries.

A number of outlandish explanations for the disappearance have been suggested; all are based on faulty logic and spurious evidence.

This is the story of what really happened on a December afternoon in 1945 over the ocean east of Florida.

Flight 19

A number of training flights were scheduled at Naval Air Station Ft. Lauderdale in Florida for Wednesday December 5, 1945. Although the weather during most of the day was forecast to be good, a storm front bringing strong winds and heavy rain was expected to arrive by the early evening. All flights were scheduled to be safely back at base well before the storm arrived.

Flights from NAS Ft. Lauderdale were assigned a number according to the order they were expected to take off on a particular day, Flight 19 was one of them. The mission was to be led by Lt. Charles Carroll Taylor, USNR, an instructor at the base and an experienced combat pilot with over 2,500 hours of flying time. The four remaining aircraft were to be flown by trainees from the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps. All the aircraft involved were Grumman TBM Avengers.

The flight plan, known as Navigation Problem No.1, included four legs. The first leg headed east from Ft. Lauderdale on a heading of 091° for 56 miles to an area on the charts known as Hen and Chicken Shoals. There the aircraft would conduct glide-bombing attacks on a wrecked ship.

The second leg continued for a further 67 miles on the same heading to a small island called Great Stirrup Cay. At that point, the flight would turn on to a heading of 346°, which they would maintain for 76 miles to Great Sale Cay. Finally, the aircraft would turn on to the last leg, holding a heading of 241° for 120 miles. This would bring them back over the east coast of Florida somewhere north of NAS Ft. Lauderdale.

The flight was scheduled to take-off at 13:45 and the total flight time was expected to be two-and-a-half hours, bringing the planes back to base before sunset and well before the expected arrival of bad weather.

The same exercise had been successfully completed by hundreds of trainees flying from NAS Ft. Lauderdale. In fact, Flight 18, the flight that took-off immediately before Flight 19, was also running through Navigation Problem No.1. It completed the flight and returned to base without incident. For Flight 19, this routine training exercise would go horribly wrong. The planes vanished and a number of young men lost their lives as a direct result.

What went wrong?

After the events of Dec. 5, the U.S. Navy established a Board of Investigation to look into what went wrong. Investigators relied heavily on radio messages and transcripts.

Over the decades theories as to the cause of the disaster (some fantastical) have emerged, with proponents referencing wholly invented portions of the official record devised to make this strange event even more mysterious. For example, a 1962 magazine article about the Flight 19 disappearance references the radio transmission: “Everything looks wrong, strange, the ocean doesn’t look as it should.” And in Charles Berlitz’ book The Bermuda Triangle (1974) you’ll find my personal favourite: “Don’t come after us. They look like they’re from outer space!” Although several of these purported radio messages have entered the mythology of Flight 19, there is no good evidence that any of them are real.

What we do know is that Flight 19 took off at around 14:10 (25 minutes later than scheduled) and that between 14:30 and 15:00, Ft. Lauderdale Operations logged two radio messages from planes in Flight 19. These were aircraft-to-aircraft communications regarding the dropping of bombs. The messages confirm that the flight had reached Hen and Chicken Shoals on schedule and were carrying out practice attacks.

The next person to overhear radio calls between the aircraft of Flight 19 was Lt. Robert Cox, a senior flight instructor at NAS Ft. Lauderdale who was flying above the base in another Avenger aircraft. At around 15:40 he picked up signals from a training flight that seemed to be in trouble. Specifically, he heard calls to someone named Powers, presumably Capt. Edward Joseph Powers Jr., a Marine aviator flying one of the aircraft of Flight 19. In the ensuing transmissions, it appeared that neither Powers nor the person calling him seemed to know where they were. Cox contacted Ft. Lauderdale Operations (who were unable to hear these transmissions) and told them that he was abandoning his training flight in order to try to help the lost aircraft. He sent out a blind radio call to the “plane or boat calling Powers.”

At around 15:50 he received a response from an aircraft that identified itself with the call sign “MT-28.”

“Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” the person’s voice reported. “I am over land, but it’s broken. I am sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.”

Within this radio message lies a likely solution to the mystery of Flight 19 and an indication that something was very wrong with Lt. Taylor. The aircraft had flown almost due East from Ft. Lauderdale for around 120 miles after taking off, and should then have turned to a heading of 346˚ . Wherever the aircraft were at 15:50, they could not have been anywhere close to the Florida Keys, which the voice on the radio seemed to be indicating.

There are other problems with this message. Taylor identified himself with the call-sign “MT-28” but his actual call sign was “FT-28.” Later, when prompted by Cox, he corrected this. More worrying was the fact that Taylor claimed to be over the Florida Keys but didn’t know how to get to Ft. Lauderdale. Every pilot flying from either Miami or Ft. Lauderdale knew that, if they were over the Florida Keys in the afternoon, all they had to do was put the sun over their left wing and they would then be flying north and towards safety.

Clearly, Flight 19 could not really have been over the Florida Keys at 15:50. But if that is what Taylor believed, then he should have known how to fly north even if both his compasses were out. The fact that he didn’t seems to confirm that he was in the midst of some kind of severe mental confusion.

It also seems unlikely that all compasses in all five aircraft had failed (and this was never suggested in any radio call) so all Taylor would have had to do was hand over control to an aircraft with a working compass. Cox suggested this to Taylor who agreed. His last messages to Cox suggested that he had turned to the North, believing that he was flying up the Keys towards Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. However, Cox had by this time turned to the south, hoping to meet the lost flight, but he noted that radio transmissions from Taylor were getting fainter, meaning that Flight 19 was actually getting further away.

That makes perfect sense with what we now know. At that point, the aircraft of Flight 19 were probably out over the Atlantic and, by flying north or east, would be moving further from Ft. Lauderdale, not closer to it. Everything that followed was based on Taylor’s initial and strange error in claiming that Flight 19 was over the Florida Keys at 15:50.

Cox lost contact with Flight 19 soon after, but Air-Sea Rescue Task Unit Four at Port Everglades was able to make intermittent contact with the lost flight.

At 16:45 Taylor once again mentioned being over the “Gulf of Mexico.” After 17:00, transmissions from Flight 19 became fragmentary and difficult to read. At one point, Taylor was heard to say to another aircraft in the flight: “You didn’t get far enough east!” Another pilot in the flight angrily retorted: “Dammit, if we could just fly west we would get home!”  

That pilot was right. At 17:50, it was finally possible to triangulate the radio signals from the aircraft and to confirm that they were around 120 miles East of Daytona Beach, over the Atlantic Ocean. They seemed to be flying west, towards land, but one of the last messages overheard from Taylor soon after 18:00, said: “I suggest we fly due east until we run out of gas.” 

By that time, it was almost dark, the storm was approaching and the aircraft had barely enough fuel remaining to reach land. It seems certain that the planes once again turned to the east, towards the open Atlantic, and continued until all five ran out of fuel and ditched in darkness and rough seas. In those circumstances, none of the 14 men of Flight 19 stood any chance of survival.

Conclusion

Something very strange happened to Lt. Charles Taylor during the afternoon of Dec. 5. He suddenly transposed the position of his flight over 200 miles south-west of Flight 19’s real position. The tragic chain of circumstances that followed all came from this first inexplicable error. For the few hours of life he had remaining, Taylor remained convinced that Flight 19 was somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico when they were really over the Atlantic. What followed was a tragic tug-of-war as Taylor urged the flight to fly east or north which he believed (mistakenly) would take them to Florida. The other pilots (rightly) understood that they needed to fly west.

The Board Report also noted that Taylor had arrived late at NAS Ft. Lauderdale that day and went to see the Aviation Duty Officer, Lt. Arthur Curtis. He asked to be excused from flying that afternoon, but refused to give a reason. His request was denied and his late arrival is the reason why Flight 19 was delayed in taking off.

Taylor also seems to have been unprepared for this flight. None of the Avenger aircraft involved were fitted with clocks – students and instructors were expected to use their own wristwatches during the flight. However, Taylor was heard on several occasions to ask other aircraft how long they had been flying on a particular heading, suggesting that he didn’t have a working watch. That’s very odd indeed. Knowing how long one has been flying on a heading is an essential part of dead reckoning navigation.

The initial report produced by the Board of Investigation concluded that the flight had been lost when Lt. Taylor suffered some form of unknown “mental aberration.” Looking at the evidence, that seems the only possible conclusion. But Taylor’s mother Katherine began a campaign to have this finding changed. She claimed that, as nobody really knew what had happened to the missing aircraft, blaming her son was unfair and unreasonable.

In response, in 1947, the U.S. Navy exonerated Taylor and amended the official cause of the loss of Flight 19 as “unknown.” When in the 1960s writers became interested in the Bermuda Triangle, the loss of six aircraft (a Mariner PBM-5 aircraft sent out to search for Flight 19 also vanished with 13 men on-board) with an “unknown” cause was too much to resist.

Flight 19 became part of the mythology of the Bermuda Triangle and the focus of bizarre claims involving UFOs, timeslips and giant waterspouts. Steven Spielberg’s classic 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, begins with the sudden reappearance of the aircraft of Flight 19 in the Sonoran Desert, placed there by the aliens who whisked the crews away in 1945. This is certainly an aviation mystery, but it seems certain that the final answer lies not in the far reaches of space but within the uncharted depths of human psychology.  

Steve MacGregor is the author of The Real Story of Flight 19: The Unsolved Mystery of the Disappearance of Six U.S. Navy Aircraft in December 1945. His other books include: The First Cruisers: The Origin, design, Development, Production and Operational Use of the British A9 Cruiser Tank Mk. I and A10 Cruiser Tank Mk. II.