Bermuda Triangle plane mystery 'solved'

[Calabi]

This really...

Surely private investigation's could have come up with this back then!

We were stupid back then, in the intervening years we have evolved a superior intelligence which allows us now to come up with the correct answer from a grouping of four possible answers.

 

[998cc]

got a linky must have missed that, or forgot.

It was a documentary i watched. The navigator mistook the islands he was flying over for the florida keys or something and they subsequently ran out of fuel and ditched in the water

-edit-

http://www.militaryairshows.co.uk/unex13.htm

 

[Kainz]

imho

OT: I don't know why it took them so long to find this out, but it's all well and good, I guess
BSAA's safety record sounds atrocious.

I LOVE films like this! DO WANT! MUST HAVE!

 

[markweatherill]

This is a publicity stunt by Barry Manilow.

 

[swanseajack]

Flight 19, there are still questions unanswered like why did the compasses in all five planes start spinning, and what happened to one of the search planes that was sent out to look for them to also disappear.

What happened to the Cyclops that disappeared with over 300 people on board.

 

[Biohazard]

Flight 19, there are still questions unanswered like why did the compasses in all five planes start spinning, and what happened to one of the search planes that was sent out to look for them to also disappear.

What happened to the Cyclops that disappeared with over 300 people on board.

I read that they were just 'out'?

 

[lokkers]

what happened to one of the search planes that was sent out to look for them to also disappear.

PBM's were basically flying fuel tanks. It wasn't uncommon for the pilot to get the crew to turn out their pockets to check for cigarettes and other flammable materials, because the risk of explosion was so great. I believe a ship in the area reported a large explosion and fireball at around the time the PBM dropped off the airwaves, so the theory is that it suffered a catastrophic fire.

What happened to the Cyclops that disappeared with over 300 people on board.

Violent storm probably, or overloaded with a cargo that the crew were unfamiliar with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cyclops_(AC-4)

People forget just how big the Atlantic is - remember the Air France plane that went down? It took them a few days to find bits of it, and that's with better equipment and faster response times than 50+ years ago.

 

[Malt_Vinegar]

You need to consider the area that they are flying in is one thats very difficult to establish where you are from visiual prompts.

Combine this with faulty instrumentation, and instrument blindness, and its easy to see why these things happen in this area.

 

[SexyGreyFox]

I thought this was solved years ago - it was methane coming out from the sea bed.

(or Aliens)

 

[The Dread Pirate]

Good Good Suspicion has been drawn away from me fo... erm... *whistles*

 

[Lysander]

We were stupid back then

Indeed, nobody did anything clever before 1940. It's just as well we live in the 21st century now. A hundred years beforehand we were still traveling from mudhut to mudhut by dangling carrots in front of ponies.

 

[Greenlizard0]

Don't be such a loon.

It was clearly undersea bubbles of methane gas rising and causing massive turbulence.

Nail on head.

Methane nulllifies the Bernouille (sp) effect therefore causing all planes to fall out of the sky. And it changes the density of water so ships sink too.

 

[Amp34]

Don't be such a loon.

It was clearly undersea bubbles of methane gas rising and causing massive turbulence.

There are locations where unnaturally high waves are common due to their location. The resulting wave fronts reinforce and the waves have a larger range than normal. One of the issues with some oil rig locations according a documentary. The effect really appears during storms when it causes very large waves.

Methane bubbles from deposits of a chemical that breaks down with higher temperatures which is usually solid. The bubbles from large incidents cause the density under the ship to decrease sharply to a point where the water can't support the ship, leading to it sinking.

There are huge pockets of "frozen" methane gas on the east American continental shelf, which are safe at the moment partly due to the low temp of the water and partly due to the pressure above them. However if sea temps rise or the pressure decreases (either reduced sea level or removal of sediment above them, from a slump for example) their stable state then declines and as you said they then bubble up to the surface.

These methane pockets are actually studied quite hard because they are thought to be one of the reasons behind extreme global warming in the past ( for example the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum or PETM), where runaway heating occured after a longer slower warming event, which could be copied again in the near future. Once it starts it causes it's own runaway reaction and earth becomes very hot (comparatively, global temps increased by around 5 degrees, which is huge)

I agree, I think a few ships may have gone down like this, however it is a huge area of nothingness, and just remember how hard it was to find any wreckage from that plane that went down between Brazil and France the other month.