Posted on 12/04/2007 9:44:44 PM PST by ConservativeStatement
TALLADEGA — In the years since his retirement as CEO of Kockums (previously Soderhamm) forestry products factory, Tom Richardson has taken up painting as a hobby. He’s pretty good, too. He even won first prize at an arts fair in Florida, best of show out of about 300 pieces entered in the event.
But another experience he had in Florida crosses his mind from time to time — a post-World War II tragedy that has inspired books, television programs, movies and a catalog of unexplained phenomena theories that have found a place in the national lexicon under the “Bermuda Triangle” heading.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailyhome.com ...
Interesting story. I suspect that thinking the last sight of land was in the Keys, Taylor thought he was somewhere over Florida Bay/Gulf of Mexico and headed NNE thinking he would encounter the Everglades. The sad reality is that the last island they passed over was in the Bahamas and by going NNE, the flight went way out into the Atlantic. By the time Taylor decided to head West, they didn’t have fuel to make land and went down somewhere between the Sargasso Sea and land..
Have always been a little less than impressed with the amazing-disappearing aircraft over the xpanse of huge ocean bodies. I mean, c’mon. Horrible tragedy, but not unexpected. The “Bermuda Triangle” just happens to also be one of the most traveled airways around.
Now, if there was some strange disappearance of say, locomotives on a stretch of BN track in Montana, then we could talk..
Ran out of gas. Bummer.
I had seen that ( ran out of gas ) in reports.
What caused their compasses to fail, or did only the leader’s compass fail and the rest of the flight had to follow him??
“The “Bermuda Triangle” just happens to also be one of the most traveled airways around.”
An interesting thing that an (Bermuda debunking) author wrote in 1974 about the triangle, was that insurance rates there were no higher than they should be (normal).
I found that very convincing.
You probably find that little talking Gekko convincing too.
How mundane!
Thx
oung
>> CEO of Kockums (previously Soderhamm) <<
reminds me of... (paraphrased from memory):
RH: Excuse me, you changed your name TO Madame LaTrine?
MH: Yes, it’s much better than my old name
RH: What was your old name?
MH: Madam $h!+h0le.
— Robin Hood, Men in Tights.
Yeah, I’m not very impressed by this story. A lead pilot got lost, got the whole wing of rookies in trouble, and then kept simply flying back and forth burning fuel.
> “What caused their compasses to fail, or did only the leader’s compass fail and the rest of the flight had to follow him??’
From what I have read, I believe that the leader did not believe his compass. He had flown a lot on the west side of Florida before changing bases to the east part of Florida. I think he became confused with what he saw vs what his compass told him. He wavered between believing his eyes and believing his compass, which were telling him exactly opposite things.
If you read his radio statements with that in mind, it makes more sense.
“You probably find that little talking Gekko convincing too.”
Huh?
I don't remember that there was any problem with the compasses. The disaster was completely Lt. Charles Taylor's fault. He appears to have become totally discombobulated and reached the conviction that he was south of Florida in the Florida Keys even though his flight plan had taken him east of Ft. Lauderdale. He thought this even though the radio transcripts show his students telling him that he was wrong, and that if they just flew west they'd reach the Florida mainland.
I don't think anything can really account for it except for a complete brain spasm on Taylor's part. Before being assigned to Ft. Lauderdale he'd routinely flown out of Miami on a Florida Keys flight plan, so my guess is he got disoriented and thought he was still doing those old flights. What triggered it? Who knows.
The same thing that's caused innumerable flight deaths... failure to trust ones instruments.
It was a training mission; the experienced flyer was very badly hung over, and had previously been flying out of western FL; on the radio one of the students could be heard arguing that they were flying the wrong direction, and eventually convinced the “lost squadron” to fly west; when he went down (fuel out, if memory serves), the instructor harangued them all to fly east again; hey, the instructor had asked not to work that day.
An interesting note, some years back someone estimated the probable position of some of the lost planes, found a plane of the correct make and model down on the bottom, but the number on the plane didn’t match that of any of the craft from the “lost squadron”. So close, yet so far.
But I don’t know if it is a joke about the Gekko, or if you don’t see the point about insurance rates being normal because there is no unusual loses in the “triangle”.
Insurance companies have no humor sense, so if there was risk in the “triangle” as was a huge claim for a couple of decades, the companies would be the best source for data and they would have raised their rates.
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