Source: Aircraft squadron lost in the Bermuda Triangle, History.com
Translated by: Nguyen Thi Kim Phung
On this day in 1945, at 2:10 p.m., five bombers from the Grumman TBM Avenger Squadron 19 took off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida. They were scheduled to conduct a routine three-hour training flight. The plan was to fly 120 miles east, 73 miles north, and then make the final 120 miles back to the naval base. However, they never returned.
Two hours into the flight, the squadron leader of Squadron 19, who had been flying in the area for more than six months, reported that both the primary and secondary compasses on the aircraft had failed, and he was unable to determine his position.
The other four planes also suffered similar failures. Ground radio attempts to locate the missing squadron were unsuccessful. After more than two hours of incoherent messages from the planes, at 6:20 p.m., a radio picked up a message from the squadron leader to the other crew members, asking them to all evacuate their planes at once, as they were running low on fuel.
By that time, several ground radar stations had finally been able to determine that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the Florida coast. At 7:27 p.m., a Martin PBM Mariner patrol plane took off with a crew of 13 on a search and rescue mission. Three minutes later, they radioed back to base that they had begun their mission. That was the last time the plane was heard from. A tanker off the Florida coast then reported seeing an explosion at 7:50 p.m.
The mysterious disappearance of the 14 pilots of Flight 19 and the 13 crew members of the rescue plane sparked one of the largest air and sea searches of its time, with hundreds of ships and planes scouring the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and parts of Florida’s interior. Yet no trace of the men or aircraft was ever found.
Although Navy officials have blamed stormy weather for the failure to find the six planes and their 27 crew members, the story of the “Lost Squadron” has added credence to the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, a region in the Atlantic Ocean where many ships and planes are said to have disappeared without a trace. The Bermuda Triangle is said to stretch from the southern coast of the United States, through Bermuda, down to the Atlantic coast of Cuba and Santo Domingo.
