Dec 5, 2007 7:41 pm US/Eastern
Veterans Remember Flt. 19, The Lost Squadron
FT. LAUDERDALE (CBS4) ―
DECEMBER 5TH, 1945: 62 years ago to the day the headline of the Ft. Lauderdale Daily News read "
14 NAS Airmen Missing". Their planes had gone down in what's now referred to as the
Bermuda Triangle.
Today, there are still a lot of questions about what actually happened to the "lost squadron."
Lt. Charles Taylor was the leader of Navy flight 19 which took off from Ft. Lauderdale. The 5 Avenger torpedo bombers with 14 men on board were on a routine training mission to the Bahamas. But somewhere over the so called
Bermuda Triangle, the flight ran into problems and vanished.
"We couldn't believe it, 5 of our planes missing," said Dave White who was part of the search crew who spent days of scouring the ocean only to find no sign of the missing planes, or their crews.
"My feeling is that those planes disintegrated when they hit the water," said White. "Probably nobody got out of the planes."
"I flew in the PBY (Catalina) on the search 4 days in a row," said Frank Daily who lost a friend when Flight 19 went down.
He lost even more fellow airmen when 13 men from his base were killed when their PBM Mariner crashed while searching for the missing squadron.
"The assumption made later was perhaps there were gas fumes in the PBM and somebody lit a cigarette and it blew up," said Daily.
Neither White nor Daily say they put much stock in the wild stories that Bermuda Triangle swallowed up the planes.
"It's an interesting story, it's nice speculation," said Daily, "but I doubt if it has much to substantiate it."
While some
believe in the mysteries and the legend of the
Bermuda Triangle and
others scoff, you might be interested to know that when you take off over the ocean from Miami International Airport or Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, you are flying right into the
Bermuda Triangle.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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