The mission was Navigation Problem Number One -- a standard triangular training route. The five Avengers were to fly east from Fort Lauderdale, conduct practice bombing runs at Hens and Chickens Shoals in the Bahamas, then turn north and finally southwest back to base. Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor led the flight. He was an experienced pilot with 2,500 flying hours and a combat tour in the Pacific behind him, but he was new to the Fort Lauderdale area. The bombers completed their practice runs without incident. Then, about 90 minutes after takeoff, Taylor radioed that both his compasses had failed and he could not determine his position. He believed the small islands below him were the Florida Keys. They were almost certainly the Bahamas.

What followed was a cascading navigation error that turned confusion into catastrophe. Believing he was over the Gulf of Mexico, Taylor turned the flight northeast -- the direction that should have taken them to the Florida coast if they were near the Keys. Instead, it carried them farther out over the open Atlantic. Radio transmissions captured fragments of disagreement: subordinate pilots believed they should fly west, toward the mainland, but Taylor overruled them. The control tower at Fort Lauderdale told Taylor he could not be near Key West based on the wind direction that day, but the training frequency was jammed with interference from Cuban radio stations, making communication difficult. Taylor refused to switch to the search and rescue frequency. At one point he turned west, the correct heading, but abandoned it after deciding they had gone far enough without seeing land. He turned northeast again. By then, the Avengers were likely far beyond their fuel range.

As Flight 19's situation became desperate, air bases scrambled search aircraft. A Consolidated PBY Catalina launched first. After dark, two Martin PBM Mariner flying boats were diverted from their own training flights to search the waters west of the Bahamas. One of them -- PBM-5 BuNo 59225, carrying 13 men -- took off from Naval Air Station Banana River at 7:27 p.m., radioed a routine message three minutes later, and was never heard from again. At 9:15 p.m., the tanker SS Gaines Mills reported witnessing an explosion that sent flames leaping high into the sky, burning for ten minutes. The crew searched through oil and aviation gasoline but found no survivors. An escort carrier also lost radar contact with an aircraft at the same position. The Mariner, known for fuel vapor problems that earned it the nickname "flying gas tank," had almost certainly exploded in midair.

The Navy's 500-page investigation concluded that Taylor had mistaken the Bahamas for the Keys and led his flight to the northeast over open ocean until the planes ran out of fuel and ditched at sea. The Avengers, heavy torpedo bombers, were known to sink within seconds of water contact. Taylor's mother contested the findings, and the Navy eventually amended the cause to "unknown." The search for wreckage has never stopped. In 1986, an Avenger was found off the Florida coast during the hunt for Space Shuttle Challenger debris, but it was not from Flight 19. In 1991, five Avenger wrecks were discovered together on the ocean floor -- their tail numbers proved they were unrelated. Training accidents between 1942 and 1945 had lost 95 aviation personnel from Fort Lauderdale alone; the seafloor was littered with wrecks that were not Flight 19. As of the 2020s, no confirmed trace of the five Avengers, the PBM Mariner, or the 27 missing aviators has been found.

Flight 19 did not create the Bermuda Triangle legend by itself, but it became its most famous chapter. The disappearance of six military aircraft and 27 men in a single afternoon, with no wreckage and no explanation beyond navigational error, was too strange for the rational answer to satisfy. Steven Spielberg put Flight 19 into the opening scene of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, the Avengers materializing pristine in the Sonoran Desert, their crews returned decades later from an alien mothership. The reality is more prosaic and more haunting: five planes flew the wrong direction, ran out of gas over deep Atlantic waters, and sank. The ocean kept them. Somewhere north of Abaco Island, in waters too deep and too vast to search completely, fourteen men went down together -- just as Taylor's last transmission promised they would.