Perhaps the most notorious of disappearances in the Triangle, the fate of Flight 19 and PBM Mariner has left even the greatest minds reaching for answers. When Flight 19, a group of five Avenger Torpedo bombers, took off from Fort Lauderdale on 5th December, 1945, they had expected their three-hour bombing journey to be just as uneventful as the runs that they had done countless times before.
Shortly after dropping their payload of replica bombs, the patrol began to run into trouble. Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor, an experienced pilot, believed that his compass had started to malfunction, and that Flight 19 had been flying in the wrong direction. Concerned, Taylor contacted another Navy flight instructor who was flying close to the Florida coast. With the weather getting increasingly worse, Taylor went against protocol of pointing a lost plane towards the setting sun. Believing that they were somewhere over Florida Keys, Taylor adjusting the heading in an attempt to navigate the Gulf of Mexico.
Sensing Taylor’s mistake, some of his men challenged his decision to continue northeast and convinced him to turn tale and head back westward. For reasons unknown however, he once again turned the flight back around still concerned that they were somewhere over the Gulf. As the flight flew further away from land, their transmissions became fainter and fainter.
Having flown for more than their allotted time, the crew were starting to get concerned that they wouldn’t be able to correct their navigation before they ran out of fuel. In his final transmission, Taylor told his men that once the first plane dropped below ten litres of fuel, they would all ditch together for a greater chance of rescue. A few short minutes later the transmissions ended.
Certain that the flight had ditched into the ocean, the Navy immediately launched a search and rescue effort. Two Mariner flying boats were scrambled to search for the missing Flight 19, however 20 minutes after taking off one of the Mariner’s disappeared off the radar. Neither the 13 crewmen, 5 pilots of Flight 19, nor the wreckages of any of the aircraft were ever recovered.
