Disappearance Of Flight 19: A Short Story Of The Bermuda Triangle

Another story of the Bermuda Triangle is also the strange disappearance of the ship the Marine Sulfur Queen. The ship was built in 1944 as a T2 tanker whose purpose was to ship oil during World War II (Bhattacharya, 2015). However, once the war had come to an end, the ship had been altered to instead ship molten sulfur. For this to be possible, the ship had to be remodeled internally, adding on huge sulphur carrying tanks. The tanks were meant to be kept at high temperature as well so that the sulfur would remain molten. The two hundred fifty-four foot ship had a crew of thirty-nine who departed from Beaumont, Texas on February second, 1963 (Gaddis, 1964). The ship carried over fifteen thousand tons of sulfur in its tanks and a crew of

Flight 19, the name give to a group of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, took off in the early afternoon on December fifth, 1945. The five planes “were scheduled to tackle a three-hour exercise known as ‘Navigation Problem Number One.’ Their triangular flight plan called for them to head east from the Florida coast and conduct bombing runs at a place called Hens and Chickens Shoals. They would then turn north and proceed over Grand Bahama Island before changing course a third time and flying southwest back to base” (Andrews, 2015). Save for one plane carrying two crewmembers, each torpedo had a crew of three men, most of which that had logged three hundred hours of air time in their careers. Flight 19 was led by a pilot by the name of Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor, “an experienced pilot and veteran of several combat missions in World War II’s Pacific Theater”. Things had started out smoothly when Flight 19, the planes arriving at the Hens and Chickens Shoals at about 2:30 PM and dropping bombs without any incident, “But shortly after the patrol turned north for the second leg of its journey, something very strange