How the Disappearance of Flight 19, a Navy Squadron Lost in 1945, Fueled the Legend of the Bermuda Triangle Eighty years ago, five planes vanished during a training run off the Florida coast. A patrol plane sent to search for the men went missing, too, giving rise to a host of conspiracy theories Francine Uenuma - History Correspondent Get our newsletter! Get our newsletter!
“I don’t know where we are,” a voice on the radio said. “We must have got lost after that last turn.”
This message was the first inkling that something was amiss with Flight 19, a routine United States Navy training run off the coast of Florida on December 5, 1945. In the confusing hours that followed, the five torpedo bombers’ radio transmissions grew fainter as their fuel supply dwindled. Soon, the men—a mix of Marines and naval aviators—were no longer able to communicate with land, and two naval patrol bombers were dispatched to search for them. A short time later, one of the rescue planes abruptly dropped off radio contact and disappeared, too.
In total, six aircraft carrying 27 men (14 from Flight 19 and 13 from the patrol bomber) vanished over the so-called Bermuda Triangle that day. No confirmed trace of them has ever been found. Eighty years later, Flight 19 remains one of aviation’s most notable mysteries—and where answers are elusive, legions of theories have emerged to fill in the blanks.
From alien abductions to the lost continent of Atlantis, magnetic anomalies, methane eruptions and time travel, highly improbable explanations for the disappearances of planes and ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle have gripped the public’s imagination. Flight 19 has even appeared in both a Steven Spielberg film and a Scooby-Doo mystery.
Yet the real postwar tragedy that inspired these fictionalizations is a mystery that denies the imagination a satisfying explanation, supernatural or otherwise. Instead, false assumptions, fleeting communications and a hastily scrambled rescue search left behind clues as to what transpired in the final moments of Flight 19—and exposed a series of decisions that, if they’d unfolded differently, might have brought the men home safely.
A minute-by-minute breakdown of the disappearance of Flight 19
At 2:10 p.m. on December 5, flight leader Charles Carroll Taylor, a 28-year-old lieutenant known as “C.C.,” took off from Naval Air Station (NAS) Fort Lauderdale. He was accompanied by four other planes. The squadron’s flight plan advised the men to practice bombing on a small grouping of rocks near the Bahamian island of Bimini, a distance of 56 miles, then fly up over the northern islands of the Bahamas before turning back east to Fort Lauderdale—a routine navigation exercise intended to last around 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Lieutenant Robert F. Cox, the pilot of an unrelated flight coming out of the same air station, picked up that first concerning transmission shortly before 3:45 p.m., according to declassified records digitized by the National Archives. In a later interview with investigators, Cox recounted establishing contact with Taylor, who informed him that “both my compasses are out. … I am over land, but it’s broken. I’m sure I’m in the [Florida] Keys, but I don’t know how far down, and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.”
Cox, who didn’t yet realize that Flight 19 couldn’t have made it as far south as the Keys, advised Taylor to fly north, with the setting sun visible to the west on his left wing. He also offered to fly toward the lost pilot’s location to pick the men up. Taylor waved Cox off, reassuring his fellow lieutenant that he now knew where he was. “Don’t come after me,” Taylor said—a statement that would later assume mythical significance in the supernatural theories that proliferated after Flight 19 vanished.
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