STILL ONE OF THE GREATEST AVIATION MYSTERIES!
Growing up my dad told me about this!
THE MYSTERY OF FLIGHT 19!
5 December 1945, at about 1410, Five Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers carrying 14 men, were to fly to the Hens and Chickens shoals in the Bahamas to practice and then return to the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station.
It was supposed to be a routine navigation exercise and mock bombing run.
But 90 minutes after takeoff, squadron commander Lt. Charles C. Taylor reported that he was lost. The weather and sea conditions got worse as the evening wore on.
Over the next three hours, he mistakenly led Flight 19 far out to sea, where the planes apparently ran out of fuel and crashed.
That was on 5 December 1945, several months after the end of WWII.
A search was launched for the 5 lost planes, with units of the Navy, Army and Coast Guard, to scour the sea for the lost NAS Aircraft. Flight 19 remains one of the great aviation mysteries.
The pilots’ ultimate fate was never determined, nor was the fate of thirteen other men sent out to search for their lost shipmates.
Within minutes of learning of the squadron’s predicament, two PBM Mariner flying boats were dispatched from NAS Banana River in Melbourne carrying rescue equipment.
Less than a half hour after take-off, at approximately 1930, 5 December, one of the PBM’s radioed the tower that they were nearing Flight 19’s last assumed position.
After sending one more position report the rescue plane and its crew of thirteen was never heard from again.
Numerous Navy Units and Sailors participated in the massive search for the missing planes.
Frank Dailey, a Naval Reserve Captain flew in a PBY-5 seaplane. He recalled that for “three days, six hours a day, they plowed up and down the whole coast of Florida, looking for wreckage but we never saw a thing.”
It was one of the largest air and sea searches in history involving hundreds of ships and planes: search and rescue crews covered more than 200,000 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, while on land they combed Florida’s interior in the hopes of solving the puzzle of what became known as Flight 19, the Lost Squadron, and the Lost Patrol.
Combined units joined in the search, as authorities pushed efforts to locate the missing planes. Scouring practically every mile of open water off the coast, were six planes from the Third Air Force, 120 planes from the Navy Air Advanced Training Command and aircraft from the Air Transport Command, the Boca Raton Army Air Field, the Coast Guard and the RAF in Nassau.
In addition, dozens of Navy and Coast Guard surface craft joined in the hunt.
The search was directed from the Coast Guard Headquarters of the Seventh Naval District in Miami.
Lt. Dave White, who was a Senior Flight Instructor at NASFL, remembers that fateful day, as he was playing bridge when he heard a knock on the door of his friend’s house: “It was the duty officer, and he said all flight instructors were due at the hangar at 0500 because five planes were missing.”
For the next three days, Lt. White, his assistant instructor and 20 of his students flew up and down the Florida coast at low altitudes, but they couldn’t find a trace of the Sailors or the wreckage.
Today, he’s convinced the planes rammed into rough seas about 60 miles east of Daytona Beach: “I don’t think anybody got out of their planes at all. I don’t think anybody survived.”
He likened hitting the ocean at high speed to “hitting a brick wall.”
Lt. White remains mystified as he has mentioned: “The leader was an experienced combat pilot, these were reliable planes in good condition, and it was a routine training mission. We were alerted to look around the islands and to keep searching the water for debris. They just vanished. 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.”