1945 жылғы АҚШ Әскери-теңіз күштерінің ұшуының жоғалуы

US Navy training flight lost in 1945

Flight 19 was the designation of a group of five General Motors TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle on December 5, 1945, after losing contact during a United States Navy overwater navigation training flight from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, Florida. All 14 naval aviators on the flight were lost, as were all 13 crew members of a Martin PBM Mariner flying boat that subsequently launched from Naval Air Station Banana River to search for Flight 19. A report by Navy investigators concluded that flight leader Lt. Charles C. Taylor mistook small islands offshore for the Florida Keys after his compasses stopped working, resulting in the flight heading over open sea and away from land. The report was later amended by the Navy to read "cause unknown" to avoid blaming Taylor for the loss of five aircraft and 14 men. The report attributed the loss of the PBM search aircraft to an explosion in mid air while searching for the flight.

In 1986, the wreckage of an Avenger was found off the Florida coast during the search for the wreckage of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Aviation archaeologist Jon Myhre raised this wreck from the ocean floor in 1990. He mistakenly believed that it was one of the missing planes. In 1991, a treasure hunting expedition led by Graham Hawkes announced that the wreckage of five Avengers had been discovered off the coast of Florida, but their tail numbers revealed they were not Flight 19. ), but he was unable to definitively identify the other planes; the documentary concluded that "Despite the odds, they are just a random collection of accidents that came to rest in the same place 12 mile (19 km) from home." In March 2012, Hawkes was reported as saying it had suited both him (and indirectly his investors) and the Pentagon to make the story go away because it was an expensive and time consuming distraction, and that, while admitting he had found no conclusive evidence, a statistician he consulted said it was Flight 19. Records showed that training accidents between 1942 and 1945 accounted for the loss of 95 aviation personnel from NAS Fort Lauderdale. In 1992, another expedition located scattered debris on the ocean floor, but nothing could be identified. In the 2000s, searchers expanded their search area farther east, into the Atlantic Ocean, but the remains of Flight 19 have still not been confirmed found. A 2015 newspaper report claimed a wrecked World War II era warplane with Navy markings and two bodies still inside was retrieved by the Navy in the mid 1960s after being discovered by a hunter in the woods near Sebastian, Florida. The Navy initially said it was from Flight 19 but later recanted its statement. Despite Freedom of Information Act requests for details in 2013, the names are still not known because the Navy does not have enough information to identify the bodies. A wrecked plane found in the Everglades in Broward County was also, incorrectly, postulated to be from Flight 19. In fact this TBN 3E crashed March 16, 1947. The crash reportedly occurred because its pilot, Ensign Ralph N. Wachob, developed vertigo. Wachob was killed in the crash. As of the 2020s, no trace of the five TBM Avengers or the PBM Mariner and the 27 missing aviators have been found. The most likely conclusion is that the Avengers ran out of gas and ditched at sea, and the PBM had a mid air explosion.

The loss of Flight 19 and the rescue aircraft that went to look for them was not the Navy's only loss in the Bermuda Triangle. While many aircraft and ships have gone down in the region, some have been identified or achieved a greater resolution. One of the other unresolved losses was the disappearance of the largest ship in the Navy at the time, the USS Cyclops. The ship vanished in March 1918 on a trip from Barbados to Baltimore. The Naval History & Heritage Command stated the vessel "probably sank in an unexpected storm", but the cause of the ship's loss is not known.