they knew was hazardous duty. Men like that deserve to be found—don’t you think?”
I couldn’t disagree. So I listened to Futch explain that for the last ten years he’d been trying to piece the real story together. Not working on it full-time, of course. He was too busy fishing Boca Grande Pass during tarpon season and flying charter clients all over the Caribbean the rest of the year.
“It’s more of an occasional hobby. Doc, you’d be surprised how many men who served at Lauderdale Naval Air Station during the second war ended up retiring to Florida. Some who flew Avengers on that exact same training route never had the first problem. Even a few who were actually there the day Flight 19 disappeared.
“I’m lucky. I fly clients all over the state. When I get the chance, I visit these old pilots in person—a couple times, it was only a few months before they died. I’d look at their scrapbooks and listen to their stories.” Futch grinned. “My god, it’s fun listening to an eighty-year-old guy who used to be a hotshit Avenger jock get all fired up over some of the crap that’s been written about Flight 19. Most of ’em believe government investigators were more interested in placing blame than in nailing down what actually happened that night. So they’re eager to help once they know I’m a pilot.
“One thing they’re all convinced of, Doc, is those fourteen sailors and Marines were competent men. They weren’t a bunch of screwup rookies, like some accounts say. Several were combat veterans from the Pacific war. Some highly decorated heroes, the flight instructor included—despite some of the bullshit that’s been written about Charles Taylor. They didn’t fly into a time warp, and they weren’t the victims of some shady government conspiracy. The men I’ve talked to are convinced their squadron mates got so damn lost, so turned around in a storm, they didn’t have a clue where they were. Didn’t even know if they were over land or water. You saw the time line I made of radio transmissions?”
I had. Once the pilots were lost, they began a series of course changes, desperately searching for mainland Florida. Even after sunset, they continued to zigzag their way into oblivion—thus the title of Gian Quasar’s book.
Futch said, “It was a black night. A storm ceiling of less than a thousand feet, in planes that had primitive electronics compared to today. No landing lights, no gyro compasses—that’s a key detail—and very limited radio range. At a time when Florida was one of the most sparsely populated states in the union.”
“No gated communities,” I offered. “No bright lights from shopping malls and football stadiums.”
“Between Palm Beach and Jacksonville, not many ground ranges to fix on,” Dan agreed. “And if they turned inland? Even Orlando was just citrus and cattle. Hardly any lights at all, coast to coast. I mentioned no gyro compasses? I’ve flown those old warplanes at air shows. Make a sharp bank and the compass spins like a damn top. Even after you level off, they’re squirrelly as hell. Which is just one reason our air bases lost fifteen thousand guys to training missions. You believe that?”
I said, “That can’t be true.”
It was. “In only five years,” Futch continued, “there were more than seven thousand plane crashes on U.S. soil! I had no idea ’till I did the research—most of those guys never even got a chance to face the damn enemy! Hell, the Gulf and Atlantic are littered with wreckage from old Avengers, B-52s, Mustangs—the whole list. People today don’t realize that, to be a fighter jock back then, you’d better have balls of brass and nerves of steel.”
Futch named some of the steely men he’d interviewed—several were important players in the Fort Lauderdale Avenger squadron. Then he’d methodically listed a couple of facts that, although historically accurate, only made the story more inexplicable.
At 5:30 p.m. on that December day, land-based radar stations, unable to pinpoint the squadron’s location, triangulated a probable location as a hundred fifty miles north of Lauderdale and forty miles out to sea. This information was not passed on to the lost pilots because of poor radio reception, or human oversight.
At 6:20 p.m.—nearly an hour after sunset—Air Station Lauderdale logged its last transmission from Flight 19. Lt. Taylor was heard radioing his squadron, “Close in tight, we’ll have to ditch unless landfall. When the first plane drops below ten gallons, we’ll all go down together.”
Automatically, my brain did the