Flight Nineteen: The Lost Squadron
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
On the afternoon of the fifth of December, nineteen forty five, five Navy torpedo bombers lifted off from the Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale and flew out over the Atlantic. They never came back. The group was known as Flight Nineteen, five Avenger aircraft carrying fourteen airmen on what was meant to be a routine navigation and bombing exercise out to shoals in the Bahamas and home again.
Something went wrong over the water. The flight leader radioed that his compasses had failed and that he could not tell where he was, apparently mistaking small islands for the Florida Keys. Low on fuel and lost, the squadron flew on into open sea and vanished.
The tragedy deepened within hours. A large flying boat launched to search for them, carrying thirteen crew, and it too disappeared, most likely exploding in the air. Over five days, searchers combed more than two hundred fifty thousand square miles of ocean and found nothing, not a raft, not wreckage, not even an oil slick.
Twenty seven men were gone. The Navy first blamed the flight leader, then quietly changed its finding to cause unknown. That single word, unknown, helped give rise to the enduring legend of the Bermuda Triangle.
