[HN Gopher] How the Disappearance of Flight 19 Fueled the Legend...
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       How the Disappearance of Flight 19 Fueled the Legend of the Bermuda
       Triangle
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2025-12-07 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
        
       | PearlRiver wrote:
       | There was a Belgian passenger plan that got lost on its way to
       | Teheran and had to land in Grozny. Before GPS planes had literal
       | human navigators with maps and sextants!
       | 
       | I would be more inclined to believe in the Bermuda triangle myth
       | if it happened with modern planes and their transponders.
        
         | macintux wrote:
         | Your comment reminded me about the concrete arrows deployed
         | across the U.S. for pilots.
         | 
         | https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/before-radios-pilots-n...
         | 
         | According to that, Montana still uses them.
        
           | abbycurtis33 wrote:
           | Absolutely unbelievable there's not an overhead picture in
           | that article.
        
             | lukan wrote:
             | Plenty of pictures are here instead
             | 
             | https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/
        
           | buildsjets wrote:
           | Unfortunately, they de-commissioned the airway beacon system
           | as an official navaid and stopped maintenance for the ground
           | markers during the pandemic. Most are still there, but
           | unlighted and unmaintained. A limited few are being operated
           | by a historical society.
           | 
           | https://www.mdt.mt.gov/aviation/beacons.aspx
        
         | EdwardDiego wrote:
         | IIRC some passenger aircraft had a sweet periscopic sextant
         | installed, and even the 747 still had a sextant port - not that
         | it stopped KAL-007 crossing the Kamchatka peninsula...
        
       | linksnapzz wrote:
       | This story was why, since I was very young, I'd been fascinated
       | by this scene:
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/gkBIToB43g4?si=9tQdIdoZ4qCrE1g7
        
       | fleahunter wrote:
       | The Bermuda Triangle is basically what happens when three forces
       | line up: the military's need to preserve reputation, the media's
       | need for a compelling narrative, and the public's appetite for
       | mystery over mundane failure.
       | 
       | Flight 19 is a perfect case study. You have: inexperienced
       | trainees, a leader with possibly shaky navigation skills, bad
       | weather, limited radio and radar, and institutional reluctance to
       | write "we lost them because of human error and poor procedures"
       | in big letters. So the official story ends up fuzzy enough that
       | later writers can pour anything they want into the gaps: aliens,
       | Atlantis, magnetic fields, whatever sells this decade.
       | 
       | What gets lost is that the boring explanation is actually more
       | damning. It's not a spooky ocean triangle, it's that in 1945 you
       | could take off from Florida in a military aircraft and, through a
       | few compounding mistakes and system failures, simply never come
       | back, with no way to reconstruct what really happened. The myth
       | is comforting because it moves agency from fallible humans and
       | flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious region" of the
       | map.
        
         | ofalkaed wrote:
         | >The myth is comforting because it moves agency from fallible
         | humans and flawed organizations to an impersonal "mysterious
         | region" of the map.
         | 
         | I think the myth is comforting simply because it was fun to
         | believe and a lot more interesting than the banal truth. I
         | don't think many actually believed it, other than children who
         | mostly grow out of it by the time they learn that Santa is not
         | real. Folklore, ghost stories, urban legends, etc, are fun and
         | a part of who/what we (humans) are.
        
       | joshuaheard wrote:
       | I sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.
       | When we were in the Bermuda triangle, our ship's compass starting
       | veering to one side, then made complete 360 degree turns, then
       | started spinning. We were passing a magnetic anomaly marked on
       | the chart. Fortunately, over time, the compass corrected itself.
       | If we had been in an aircraft with limited time and fuel, I don't
       | know if the compass correction would have occurred in time for
       | the aircraft to resume course and land.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-07 23:01 UTC)