On Dec. 5, 1945, only a few months after the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy suffered its worst peacetime aviation disaster, the loss of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers on a routine training mission off the Florida coast as well as a PBM Martin Mariner, which exploded and crashed during the search for the Avengers.
All 14 airmen plus 13 on the search plane were lost.
You can read more about the disaster here and here.
Author Larry Kusche, an Arizona State University professor and a native of Racine, has written a book entitled The Disappearance of Flight 19 explaining his theory of what eventually happened to the flight. Kusche focuses on the flight leader, Lt. Charles Taylor, a WWII hero, who in the process of the routine training mission may have become disoriented as to their location. The conclusion is that the pilots kept flying east with Taylor thinking he was west of Florida until they ran out of fuel and crashed at sea.
Another author, Gian J. Quasar, wrote a book entitled They Flew Into Oblivion in which he argues a different theory, namely that the flight made its way back to land and crashed into the Okefenokee Swamp along the Georgia-Florida border.
Flight 19 has become part of the Bermuda Triangle legend and a reference even made its way into Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which speculates an alien abduction of the flight crews.
