The disappearance of Flight 19 is the most famous aviation mystery in history.  It started when an entire squadron of 5 US Navy torpedo bombers and their crews (14 naval aviators) embarked on what they thought would be a routine training mission.  The squadron departed from U.S. Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale, Fl. on December 5, 1945.  They were engaging in a standard training exercise known as "Navigation Problem #1". Although it was a training mission, each of the pilots had at least 350 hours of flight time. The weather was considered normal while flying over the Atlantic when they possibly experienced unusual phenomena and anomalous compass readings.  The group was being led by the supervision of Lt. Charles Carroll Taylor, an experienced pilot who couldn't figure out which way to head.  Lt. Taylor had about 2,500 hours of flight time, however, he also was reluctant to take this mission and forty-five minutes before takeoff and requested that someone else run the exercise; no relief was available, so the request was denied.

During the flight at 4 p.m., the tower received a radio message from Taylor: "Cannot see land. We seem to be off course." Ten minutes of radio silence followed.  Then reports came in hard and fast, and very confused, from all the pilots. "We can't find west." "We can't tell where we are." "Everything looks strange, even the ocean." "Can't make out anything." "We think we may be about 225 miles northeast of base." "It looks like we are entering white water." "We're completely lost."  At one point, Taylor thought he was at the Florida Keys — horribly off course — and then claimed he had run out of islands and saw no more land. This was baffling to the tower personnel, because there is an abundance of land in the vicinity of the Keys and, according to the flight officer at Fort Lauderdale, Taylor "could not possibly have gone on more than one leg of his navigation problem and still gotten back to the Keys by 1600." Throughout all this, no mayday was ever sent.  None of the five planes were ever heard from again. They had only enough fuel to last them until 8 p.m., although there are reports of sporadic radio contact with them later than that.

Search and rescue teams were sent (SAR), but there were no signs of what could have happened to the squadron that day.   A Mariner rescue plane was lost during the SAR.  A nearby freighter, the S.S. Gaines Mills, reported sighting an explosion (a sighting later confirmed by the U.S.S. Solomons, one of the SAR vessels), no wreckage was ever found of the Mariner, either, and there were reports of strange lights in the sky immediately before the explosion.  It is still unknown what could have happend to the crews, but perhaps in time the mystery may be solved one day.

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