Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story

• Five torpedo bombers took off on a routine training exercise from the U.S. Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in 1945, never to be seen again.
• A strange final radio transmission only compounded the confusion about where the five planes vanished.
• In one of the largest search operations in naval history, a sixth plane and its crew also vanished.

On Dec. 5, 1945, a squadron of five Navy bombers took off from the U.S. Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a training exercise so routine it barely warranted a logbook entry. Three hours later, 14 men had vanished without a trace. There was no wreckage, no bodies, and no explanation. Then the plane sent to rescue them disappeared, too. Flight 19 should have been forgettable. Instead, it became the mystery that launched the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, and eight decades later, not a single piece of debris has ever been found.

The squadron of five Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers took off from the naval air station at 2:10 p.m. with three crew members aboard four of the planes and two on the fifth. At takeoff, it was a pleasant 67 degree day with a few showers scattered about. Nothing that suggested catastrophe was imminent.

The training mission flew east to conduct a practice bombing run over a pair of Bahama-based shoals called Hens and Chickens before turning north over Grand Bahama Island ahead of the final turn back south for a return to Fort Lauderdale. It was a triangle-shaped route, as it turned out. Just not the one anyone remembers.

The mystery began about 90 minutes after takeoff, once the initial practice bombs were successfully dropped and the squadron had seemingly turned north around 3:45 p.m. Lieutenant Charles Taylor, the flight’s leader, radioed the Fort Lauderdale tower with a concerning message: “Cannot see land,” he said, as the weather started to worsen. “We seem to be off course.” After the tower asked for the squadron’s position, Taylor said he couldn’t be sure where they were. “Repeat: Cannot see land.”

Lt. Robert Cox, a Navy flight instructor who was in the air at the time, overheard radio communications between the planes and noted that Taylor reported both his compasses were out.

For 10 minutes, there was silence. When the pilots made contact again, it wasn’t Taylor’s voice on the radio, but seemingly that of an older man. “We can’t find west. Everything is wrong. We can’t be sure of any direction. Everything looks strange, even the ocean,” said the unidentified pilot.

The tower tried to get the pilots to switch their radios over to a search and rescue frequency and to turn on a location transmitter for triangulation. But none of that ever happened. Some men in the squadron knew they needed to head west. “Dammit, if we could just fly west, we would get home,” one pilot was heard saying. “Head west, dammit.” Instead, Taylor turned the squadron east into the dark sky.

At one point, Taylor reported being over the Florida Keys, confusing the Bahamas with Florida’s southernmost point. That geographic misidentification probably led Taylor to believe he’d flown too far south and west of Florida, so he convinced himself they needed to fly northeast, which only compounded the tragedy. Investigators aren’t sure whether some pilots broke away from the group, believing Taylor was leading them astray, while others continued to follow his fateful heading.

After 20 more minutes of radio silence, the squadron leader’s strangely altered voice came on again, reportedly trembling. “We can’t tell where we are … everything is … can’t make out anything. We think we may be about 225 miles northeast of base,” he said before another incoherent phrase. Then came a final radio transmission. “It looks like we are entering white water … we’re completely lost.”

He didn’t know that they would be forever.

“All planes close up tight,” Taylor said near the end. “We’ll have to ditch unless landfall … when the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together.”

Knowing the immediate danger, commanders at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale ordered a pair of Martin PBM Mariner rescue aircraft to scramble and fly toward Flight 19’s last known position. Just 10 minutes into the flight, the tower lost all contact with one rescue plane, which was never heard from again. The merchant ship S.S. Gaines Mills reported seeing an explosion at sea and later an oil slick near where the plane was last known to have been flying.

With six aircraft inexplicably lost not far from the Florida coast, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard spent five days searching more than 250,000 square miles of sea. It was the largest peacetime rescue effort ever launched at the time, with hundreds of ships and planes. They found nothing.

For “three days, six hours a day, they plowed up and down the whole coast of Florida looking for wreckage,” a naval reserve captain said, according to the NAS Fort Lauderdale Museum, “but we never saw a thing.”

The 14 men aboard the five planes of Flight 19 were lost. So was the PBM Mariner and its crew of 13.

With no official determination of Flight 19’s fate recorded, the leading theory posits that Taylor got disoriented in the changing weather. A storm reached the Miami area by evening with hurricane-force winds of 75 miles per hour at 8,000 feet and Taylor mistakenly started flying east, away from Florida, before running out of fuel and crashing. The training mission-gone-awry has an unintentionally notable legacy: the catastrophe was among the first mysterious events that launched the legend of the Bermuda Triangle.