Why do planes vanish in the bermuda triangle?

The Bermuda Triangle, a loosely defined area between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, has been said since the 1950s to swallow ships and aircraft at an abnormal rate. The bodies that would notice such a pattern do not see one. The US Coast Guard, which searches for lost vessels and aircraft in the area, does not recognise the Triangle as a special hazard and regards losses there as consistent with those of any busy stretch of ocean. NOAA says the same. When the insurance market Lloyd's of London reviewed its records in the 1970s, it found no more vessels lost in the Triangle than in comparable areas and charged no higher premiums. The region is one of the most heavily travelled in the world, with cruise traffic, private boats, small aircraft and airline routes converging on Florida and the Caribbean, so its raw number of incidents is large; its rate is not.

The legend rests heavily on one event. On 5 December 1945 five Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers left Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a training flight over the Bahamas with 14 men aboard, and none returned. Radio transcripts show that the flight leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, became convinced his compasses had failed and that he was over the Florida Keys when he was in fact east of Florida. He led the formation through a series of heading changes into the Atlantic as darkness fell and the weather deteriorated, and the aircraft ran out of fuel over rough sea. A PBM Mariner flying boat sent to search exploded in the air, a known weakness of the type, adding 13 more dead. The Navy's board of investigation attributed the loss to Taylor's disorientation, and the case is a navigation accident, tragic but explicable.

Other famous disappearances look similar on inspection. The collier USS Cyclops vanished in March 1918 in a wartime storm while overloaded with manganese ore; the two Avro Tudor airliners lost in 1948 and 1949 belonged to a type with a poor safety record; and several of the ships routinely listed were actually lost thousands of kilometres away or never existed as described.

There are genuine hazards. The Gulf Stream runs through the area at up to 9 km/h (5 kn) and quickly carries wreckage and survivors away from the last known position. Squalls and waterspouts form fast over warm water. Much of the area lies over deep ocean, so nothing can be recovered to explain a sinking. And small aircraft flown by inexperienced pilots over water at night are lost everywhere. What the Triangle offers is a name and a shape, applied retrospectively by magazine writers, first in a 1964 article and then in a 1974 bestseller, to accidents that in any other patch of sea would have been recorded as weather, error or mechanical failure. Airlines cross it every day without noticing.