this, Doc,” he’d said, unbuckling the hasps. “One of my nephews found it snorkeling. What do you think?”
I’d been making notes on a gravid stingray penned outside because the animal was too big for the aquaria that line the walls of my lab. But I stopped what I was doing and said, “What’d you find this time?”
On the marble top of the chemical station, Futch placed a triad of levers affixed to a metal plate. Beneath a patina of barnacles, the levers were forged of brass and stainless, still solid but frozen by corrosion. On the plate was die-stamped MIXTURE in military block letters. Enough barnacles had been sanded away that I could also read AUTO LEAN/AUTO RICH/FULL RICH on a tracking rim that guided the levers. In what might have been yellow paint, remnants of numbers were barely visible along the aft edge of the plate. Serial numbers? Possibly. The apparatus had the weight and feel of something that had been precisely machined, engineered to meet demanding specs and tolerances.
“You want those numbers checked under a microscope?” I’d asked. “It won’t fit, but I can drop the viewing tray, or maybe we can rig something. At lowest power, we might get more detail. It’s from the controls of an old airplane, right?”
What Dan’s nephew had found was the throttle assembly from a World War II torpedo bomber, an Avenger. The Avenger, as Dan would explain, was the largest single-engine warplane of that era. The ship carried a crew of three—pilot, radioman, and gunner—plus a single thousand-pound torpedo, along with a lot of clunky radio equipment that today would have been distilled into something the size of an iPod. The plane had a thirty-yard wingspan, a range of a thousand miles, and cruised at one hundred forty knots, or about one hundred sixty mph. Fully fueled, even carrying a payload, the plane could stay aloft at cruising speed for six hours or more.
“That’s key to what makes this interesting,” Dan had told me. “Six hours of flight time and a range of a thousand miles. Remember that—it’ll help you keep an open mind.”
The comment piqued my curiosity, yet I failed to make the connection with the fabled Flight 19. No reason I should. Why would Futch be interested in a bomber squadron that, according to who you listened to, had either been abducted by aliens or disappeared into a time warp? For him, it would have been as out of character as expressing an interest in aromatherapy or vampires.
Twenty minutes later, I looked up from my Wolfe Stereomicroscope and said to him, “I’m sure of three numbers—the second, fourth, and fifth. The next number might be a one, or a seven . . . or a letter. But that’s unlikely, knowing the military. The rest of the paint is too far gone. There are some high-tech methods of recovery, but that’s the best I can do.”
I wrote the numbers on a yellow legal pad and slid it in front of Futch, who had been arranging research material and photos of Avengers on my stainless steel dissecting table. He looked at the pad, cleaned his glasses, then opened a book to do a comparison. The book, I noticed, was They Flew Into Oblivion, by someone with the unlikely name of Gian J. Quasar. Minutes later, a slow smile told me Futch liked what he’d found.
“It’s a stretch, but these could be serial numbers . . . and they might match up,” he said. “Not with Taylor’s plane . . . but maybe one of the five.” He spun the open book around. “Take a look.”
That was my first serious introduction to Flight 19’s flight instructor, Lt. Charles C. Taylor, and the few verified facts regarding five missing warplanes and a crew of fourteen men. Futch had done so much research that he could have recited the data verbatim, but he’s not the sort to lecture. Instead, he had handed me his own written summary and offered comments as I read.
On 5 December 1945, 2:10 p.m., five TBF-1 Avengers left Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a training flight known as Navigation Problem #1.
Their orders: Fly east (91°) for 141 statute miles. Turn northeast (346°) and fly 84 statute miles. Turn southwest (241°) and return to Lauderdale 140 statute miles away.
All aircraft had been checked in preflight and were fully fueled per operational procedure. Weather was reported as “Clear.” Wind 15-20 knots out of the southwest. A “perfect” day for flying, one