The Strange Disappearance of Flight 19

It was supposed to be a normal training flight. On December 5, 1945, at exactly 2:10 p.m., five Navy TBM Avenger bombers took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Their mission, called “Navigation Problem Number One,” was to fly a triangular route, drop practice bombs and come back. The flight was known as “Flight 19.”

Each plane had a crew of two or three men, either Navy pilots or Marines. Most of them had flown hundreds of hours. Their leader was Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor, a World War II veteran who had seen combat in the Pacific. Everything started perfectly.

Trouble in the Sky

Around 2:30 p.m., the planes flew over a spot called Hens and Chickens Shoals, dropped their bombs and turned north as planned. Then, things took a strange turn.

Taylor suddenly thought his compass was broken. He believed the planes were going the wrong way. Soon after, bad weather rolled in—thick clouds, wind and rain. The pilots got lost.

“I don’t know where we are,” one pilot said over the radio. “We must have got lost after that last turn.”

At that moment, another flight instructor, Lieutenant Robert F. Cox, was flying near the Florida coast. He overheard the confused radio messages and quickly told the air station. When he reached out to the patrol, Taylor’s voice came through the static:

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

That message didn’t make sense. Just an hour earlier, Taylor’s group had flown near the Bahamas but now he thought they were over the Florida Keys—hundreds of miles away. Taylor had only recently transferred to Fort Lauderdale from Miami and some later said he may have confused the two areas.

Lost and Confused

Normally, if pilots got lost over the ocean, they were supposed to fly west, toward the setting sun, to reach the mainland. But Taylor thought they were already over the Gulf of Mexico, not the Atlantic. So, instead of flying west, he made a decision that would send Flight 19 even farther out to sea—he turned northeast.

Some of the men knew something was wrong. “Dammit,” one pilot complained, “If we would just fly west, we would get home.”

Taylor finally agreed to turn west but just when things seemed to be getting back on track, he changed his mind again. Around 6 p.m., he said, “We didn’t go far enough east. We may as well just turn around and go east again.”

The other pilots probably argued and it’s believed one plane might have broken off to go its own way. But most of them followed Taylor. Their voices on the radio grew fainter and fainter as the planes drifted farther out to sea.

As fuel ran low, Taylor’s final instructions came through the radio: “All planes close up tight. We’ll have to ditch unless landfall… when the first plane drops below ten gallons, we all go down together.”

Then came silence. The last thing anyone heard was static.

The Search That Found Nothing

When Flight 19 disappeared, the Navy reacted fast. At 7:30 p.m., two large rescue planes, called PBM Mariner flying boats, took off to search the area. But only 20 minutes later, one of them vanished too.

The Mariner and its 13 crew members were never seen again. Many believed it exploded in midair. Those planes were known as “flying gas tanks” because they often caught fire. A merchant ship nearby even reported seeing a fireball in the sky and later found an oil slick on the water.

The next morning, the Navy launched a massive search operation, over 300 planes and boats were sent out. For five days, they searched more than 300,000 square miles of ocean and coastline. But they found nothing.

“They just vanished,” said Navy Lieutenant David White later. “We had hundreds of planes out looking, and we searched over land and water for days, and nobody ever found the bodies or any debris.”

The Navy board of investigation couldn’t figure it out either. They thought Taylor’s compass may have malfunctioned, causing him to mistake the Bahamas for the Keys but that still didn’t explain everything. In the end, the report said the loss of Flight 19 was due to “causes or reasons unknown.”

And that’s when the legend began.

The Bermuda Triangle Mystery

Over time, the story of Flight 19 turned into one of the most talked-about mysteries ever—the Bermuda Triangle. Back in the 1960s and 70s, writers like Vincent Gaddis and Charles Berlitz really pushed the idea that this part of the Atlantic Ocean was cursed or straight-up dangerous. They said ships and planes kept disappearing there because of weird, unexplainable forces.

Other writers came up with wilder ideas: magnetic fields, portals to other dimensions or even alien abductions. In fact, in the 1977 movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Flight 19’s planes were shown being taken by UFOs and later found in the desert.

Even though most experts don’t believe the supernatural theories, many agree that Flight 19’s disappearance was truly odd.

Strange Details About Lieutenant Taylor

One mystery that still puzzles people is Lieutenant Taylor himself. Witnesses said he showed up late to the pre-flight briefing that day. He even asked not to lead the mission, saying, “I just don’t want to take this one out.”

No one knows why he said that. Some think he was tired or stressed. Others believe he might have been unsure about the area since he was new to Fort Lauderdale.

There’s also the question of why none of the pilots used the rescue radio frequency or their ZBX receivers, which could have guided them back to land. The Navy told them to switch the devices on but for some reason, they didn’t. Whether they didn’t hear the message or ignored it remains unclear.

The Most Likely Ending

So what really happened to Flight 19? The most believable idea is that the planes just ran out of fuel and went down somewhere in the Atlantic, east of Florida. The ocean was rough that night and even if a few of the crew survived the crash, the freezing water and huge waves probably took their lives not long after.

In 1991, a group of treasure hunters thought they had finally solved the mystery. They found the wrecks of five WWII-era Avengers near Fort Lauderdale. But when investigators checked the serial numbers, the truth came out. The planes were not from Flight 19.

Decades later, the mystery still hasn’t been solved. Many people think the wreckage of Flight 19 and the missing PBM Mariner is still out there, buried deep in the Bermuda Triangle under miles of ocean and thick layers of sand.

Nearly eight decades later, no one knows for sure what happened to the six aircraft and 27 men who vanished that day.