This and many other events that followed were warning signs that things were amiss even before the start of the flight. Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, that manifest showed and the press soon reported that the other passengers on-board Trip 19 included a Special Agent of the FBI, a second FBI employee, and a prosecutor from the Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. Scripts are listed by the first noun in the title. Where would it have most likely gone down? The presence of those three individuals from the FBI and the Justice Department on the flight that day, along with the Senator, that could have been happenstance, could have been just a coincidence, that they were all on that same flight. There was that official government report on the crash, which, frankly, left many more questions than it answered. But another thing that Drew Pearson was definitely right about in his reporting was his prediction that the Justice Department was going to deny that Senator Lundeen was under investigation. Some of the transcripts include a detailed explanation of . Contrary to popular belief, the members of Flight 19 left a very telling trail of evidence of command failure, mis-navigation and error that, on face value, points to a truth that is virtually undeniable. When he ran for re-election after his first term, they voted him out. comments: this was backwards from the direction they should have been flying and put them heading further out into the open ocean how the flight leader could have thought he was over the Gulf of Mexico, west of Florida remains a mystery to this day. Even if some did escape their sinking planes, they might not have pulled their life rafts out of the hatch on the rear fuselage before the planes were swamped and sunk in the heavy seas. Flannery: When I spoke to them, it was clear as a bell. Radio check. 00 00 02 19 CC We confirm inboard cut-off. In addition to these records, there are related records in other series that have, been digitized in the custody of the National Archives at College Park - Textual Reference. 080918 AA11 Check in AA11: Boston Center, good morning, American11 with you passing through one niner zero for two three zero. Apollo 11, Houston. Everyone was killed instantly. What he appears to be is emotionally distraught. For reasons that are still unclear, Taylor became convinced that his Avengers compass was malfunctioning and that his planes had been flying in the wrong direction. Maddow: It's Saturday, August 31st, 1940. Over the next few hours, the planes would make a series of errors. And I asked his surviving younger brother, Mr. Painter, why do you think he did that? When fuel began to run low, Taylor was heard prepping his men for a potential crash landing in the. Where was he? in the Records of the Bureau of Naval Personnel (Record Group 24), there are casualty reports filed under NAS Fort Lauderdale (Box 109) and under NAS Banana River (Box 108). 081335 AA11 20 Right Boston Sector: American 11 turn 20 degrees right. Maddow: The aeronautics board report concluded that the multiple witnesses who described abnormally loud roaring engines right at the time of the crash, those witnesses were onto something. Even before his secretary arrives. This is the transcript released today of cockpit and radio communications from US Airways Flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson River on Jan. 15 after striking a flock of geese. The tail wind only increased the speed at which they flew further away from land.). These records are difficult to use because most, not all, have not been processed and described, and therefore do not have easy to use finding aids. He had to escape one such angry crowd hidden away in a refrigerated train car. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. The training flight was to take them east and fly near the Bahama Islands and then return to Fort Lauderdale. If the men werent in rafts, that distance is reduced to just 1/4 mile a flip of the coin and that is with fairly clear seas, which werent the case at the time. Because 24 congressmen are mentioned in this report that I prepared. The majority of the series in RG 313 still are unprocessed and undescribed. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. The U.S. District Court hearing the penalty phase of the Zacarias Moussaoui 9/11 trial released the transcript of the cockpit tape from the hijacked United Air Lines Flight 93 which crashed in . It was on the return when things took a different turn. Both my compasses are out and Im trying to find Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Taylor said, his voice sounding anxious. But soon there was also something else. The five Avengers are filed under VTBM1/L11-1 1945 in Box 5181 and the Mariner is filed under VPBM5/L11-1 1945 in Box 4766. 00 10 . The people should make known their protest. The board also concluded that neither the pilot nor the co-pilot were actively controlling the plane when it crashed. At the time, he was flying over Ft. Lauderdale. Lundeen: We are being urged on by insane hysteria. Creating a radius that would define a search area, this may be a massive undertaking but is still less than searching the whole ocean. They force-marched him to the local railyard, threw him in the refrigerator car of a train that was just pulling out of the station, and then locked the door. Flannery: The more I looked at it, the more it seemed that at least the government agency didn't ask the right questions or find out very much. Oct. 16, 2001. They let him ride in the caboose to the next station. There were also those reports of an altercation that took place among the passengers on-board the plane, what the secretary reportedly saw before takeoff, what the policeman reportedly told her. Might not have been. In 1977, the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind famously depicted Flight 19 as having been whisked away by flying saucers and later deposited in the deserts of Mexico. Senator Ernest Lundeen quickly became one of the loudest and most confident voices inveighing against the U.S. joining the fight. Young: Angry crowds came out to protest him and his safety was in question on more than one occasion. larry perkins pilot . At about 2:10pm Eastern Standard Time. I just dont want to take this one out, he supposedly said. He voted no to the U.S. joining the Great War. Turn on your emergency IFF gear, or do you have it on? (Ed. Here he is with producer Kelsey Desiderio: Kelsey Desiderio: So, obviously we don't know exactly where the plane came down, but do we have any rough idea, in terms of where we're standing, where did it happen? At some point, the storm disoriented the aircraft, and they became lost. They are violently committed to this mission. Why was he so upset before he got on board? Hart: When American troops are actually in combat, virtually every member of Congress, every politician sort of makes a show of supporting the troops and even goes over to visit the trenches of the Western front and things like that. And Senator Lundeen knew it. The transcript was taken from the tape recorder located on board Glenn's spacecraft. Nancy Beck Young: He was on the run for not only his political life, but his actual life. FT-28 (paraphrased): IFF gear was off, I am turning it on now. Now the expos did not mention Senator Lundeen by name, but the newspaper's description of the scheme, it was spot-on when it came to describing the nature of that relationship, the nature of the activities that Lundeen was up to with that German agent. On December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy bombers collectively known as Flight 19 took off from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. for what should have been a routine training exercise. In the stormy nighttime seas, without flares and not in rafts, most likely they would have died before morning. February 5, 2009 10:19 am. Just a few months after he lost his seat in Congress. comments: winds at altitude were about 30 to 35 knots from the west, in other words, the winds were pushing the planes out into the open Atlantic east of the Bahamas.). These accident reports include a form report describing the circumstances of the loss of the aircraft, who was aboard at the time, additional information related to the search efforts, and the general decision on who or what was to blame for the loss. . comments: As the flight leader had previously flown out of Miami and done many flights over the Florida Keys, none of this makes any sense, since it is fairly obvious how to navigate up the Keys to Miami and then continue north to Ft. Lauderdale. This confirms Flight 19s report of completing the bomb drop. Locked him in. That one, we think we know. The Navy immediately scrambled search planes to hunt for the missing patrol. A flight that none of them would survive. As the day wore on into evening, the usual Florida winter storms rolled in that day they came with a vengeance. FT-28 to his flight: Holding course 270 degrees; we didnt go far enough east we may as well just turn around and go east again. (Ed comments: The flight leader is actually advising that they turn back around and head east back toward the open ocean, having lost confidence in the westerly heading. We still don't know what caused it. "The transcript has been shared with the families, and is attached as an Annex . [1] These intercepts captured only one side of the Soviet transmissionsthose of the high-flying fighter aircraft. . And Senator Lundeen is at work, even though it's Labor Day Weekend. It was in perfect repair, it had passed all its checks. He still had the itch for elected office. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Maddow: In the hours and days that followed the crash of Trip 19, which killed Minnesota Senator Ernest Lundeen and 24 other people, there were a range of reactions across the country. Write your congressmen and senators, telephone them, wire them, come to Washington to see them. They were headed for Howland Island, a dot two feet . Located at the National Archives in College Park, there are two series of correspondence both the Commander, Gulf Sea Frontier and the Commander, Training Command, Atlantic Fleet. A few years ago, he decided he would interview some of the last living eye-witnesses, people who were actually there that day in 1940 when the disaster happened. Do some more research. Violence against government targets. On the other side of the story, not only were trained personnel lost, but so were several planes. Flannery: The report is just full of unsupported exploration of possibilities that are, that they have no basis in fact, they have no basis in science, and they just say these things. For Training Command, Atlantic Fleet are the, Confidential, Restricted and Secret General Administrative Files, 1944-1945, Confidential and Unclassified General Administrative Files, 1941-46. . He's a United States Senator from Minnesota. By morning, they probably never saw one another again. (Credit: PhotoQuest/Getty Images). Among the dozens of people killed was a sitting U.S. senator. My e-mail is: dennisporter10@yahoo.com. There was also a more general horror among the public over what up to that point was the single deadliest civilian air crash in U.S history. Im sure Im in the Keys, but I dont know how far down., Taylors claim didnt seem to make sense. Its members eventually attributed the loss to causes or reasons unknown.. On the other side of the story, not only were trained personnel lost, but so were several planes. Is that an argument? It began as nothing more than a routine training flight. In any case, the Bahamas and the Keys look a lot alike from the air and most likely he was somewhere near Great Sale Cay, which was on his intended course i.e., nowhere near the Florida Keys. But something is definitely wrong. That denial from the Justice Department, as emphatic as it was, it didnt hold up. At this point, the ground systems got a good triangulation on FT-28s broadcasts, giving moderately precise indications of his location he was within a 100-mile radius of the latitude-longitude position of 29 degrees North, 79 degrees West. He was recently transferred to NAS Fort Lauderdale (. Radio Reporter: Today, Saturday August the 31st. It's one thing to be not-excited about the U.S. fighting Nazi Germany, this really was something else. Support for that movement among serving members of Congress who prove willing and able to use their share of American political power to defend the extremists, to protect themselves, to throw off the investigation. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot: The Case of the Careless Client. APPAir traffic control tower at Los Rodeos Airport PA RTPan Am aircraft radio transmission PA . He was buried in a military cemetery. Hoping to locate the Florida peninsula, he made a fateful decision to steer Flight 19 northeasta course that would only take them even farther out to sea. It was one of the final links in a disastrous chain of errors. But there was even more that was strange about "Trip 19," as it came to be known. Besides these records that directly relate the topic of Flight 19, there may be other series in record groups that are overlooked because they are not as well known and somewhat difficult to use. After that, at a timed turn point, they would veer north for about 70 miles and then turn southwest back to Ft. Lauderdale. These, compounded by mechanical failures and what seems to be a failure of leadership, culminated in one of historys greatest aviation mysteries. While it argued that Taylor might have confused the Bahamas for the Florida Keys after his compasses malfunctioned, it could find no clear explanation for why Flight 19 had become so disoriented. Because it turns out that in addition to U.S. John Flannery didn't only talk to the surviving witnesses to the plane crash, he's also made a real study of the aeronautics board report into the crash. Unfortunately, it was later found that the hulks belonged to a different group of Navy planes whose serial numbers didnt match those of the fabled Lost Patrol. Many believe the wrecks of Flight 19 and its doomed rescue plane may still lurk somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, but while the search continues to this day, no definitive signs of the six aircraft or their 27 crewmen have ever been found. Radio Reporter: Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a leader of the America First Committee, has threatened to demand a congressional investigation of the way the Justice Department has been handling the prosecution of Nazi sympathizers. Has anyone ever done the math to establish a general search area? Young: This group of people, if they were anything first, it was their own political success and careers first. These files include correspondence from the Casualty Assistance Branch regarding the circumstances of the losses and any legal changes to their status. In the World War II Command Files that are part of the Records of the Chief of Naval Operations (Record Group 38), there is a file unit titled Shore Establishments, Jacksonville Naval Air Station Board of Investigation 5 TBM Avengers 7 December 1945 that includes a copy of the findings of the Board of Investigation (Box 419). Taylor was eventually persuaded to turn around and head west, but shortly after 6 p.m., he seems to have cancelled the order and once again changed direction. Hart: This is a speech that's sort of unlike most that Lundeen gives. Including: who else was on-board along with Senator Lundeen when the plane crashed. 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