Army & Navy: Flight into Mystery

A crisp, 20-knot wind was blowing over Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and the sun was shining brilliantly when Lieut. Charles C. Taylor led his flight of five Navy torpedo bombers out over the Atlantic. To Instructor Taylor, combat-wise veteran of vast Pacific Ocean spaces, the routine navigation problem was simple. That was the last seen of him.

Taylor, his four student pilots and nine enlisted men (most of them marines) vanished. Horror was added when the first search-rescue plane, a flying boat with a crew of 13, also vanished; a passing ship reported that it had blown up in midair.

Hundreds of U.S. and British aircraft methodically combed the seas off Florida and the Bahamas. A score of ships, including the escort carrier Solomons joined in. Every clue proved false.

Dead-Man Formation. How could five planes vanish without one of them getting off an intelligible radio signal? Had one driven the rest of a wing-to-wing, "deadman formation" into a mass collision?

Last week, in utter bafflement, the Navy called off its search. A board of inquiry began to sift far-fetched theories and farther-fetched rumors. A peacetime mystery was as unfathomable as any the war had produced.