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How the Disappearance of Flight 19 Fueled the Legend of the Bermuda Triangle
- PearlRiver 11mo agoThere 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 11mo agoYour comment reminded me about the concrete arrows deployed across the U.S. for pilots. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/before-radios-pilots-navigated-by-giant-concrete-arrows https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/before-radios-pilots-n... According to that, Montana still uses them.
- abbycurtis33 11mo agoAbsolutely unbelievable there's not an overhead picture in that article.
- lukan 11mo agoPlenty of pictures are here instead https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/ https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- buildsjets 11mo agoUnfortunately, 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 https://www.mdt.mt.gov/aviation/beacons.aspx
- andy99 11mo agoReminds me that there were a number of planes that landed accidentally on the runway of an Air Force base close to Heathrow, apparently because it shared some similar landmarks, some kind of gas tanks the pilots were using as waypoints: https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-707-raf-northolt/ https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-707-raf-northolt/
- EdwardDiego 11mo agoIIRC 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...
- aitchnyu 11mo agoThe British hid the Taj Mahal in WW2 from planes. In Indo-Pak war in 1971, cities and towns far from the border had to blackout. There was blackout in Punjab in 2025 war too.
- pjc50 11mo ago.. how do you hide the Taj Mahal? Was there significant bombing against India, and if so from where?
- aitchnyu 11mo agoTaj Mahal disguise https://old.reddit.com/r/OldPhotosInRealLife/comments/112cci9/taj_mahal_agra_india_during_ww2_and_now_in_1942/ https://old.reddit.com/r/OldPhotosInRealLife/comments/112cci... There were Japanese and German attacks in world wars, and wars later with China and Pakistan.
- linksnapzz 11mo agoThis story was why, since I was very young, I'd been fascinated by this scene: https://youtu.be/gkBIToB43g4?si=9tQdIdoZ4qCrE1g7 https://youtu.be/gkBIToB43g4?si=9tQdIdoZ4qCrE1g7
- fleahunter 11mo ago[flagged]
- ofalkaed 11mo ago>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.
- SiempreViernes 11mo agoIt is documented[0] that at its peak around 35 000 people were taking horse de-wormer against a virus, not sure if that counts as many or not but there were for sure pretty serious believers. [0] doi: 10.1007/s11606-021-06948-6
- technothrasher 11mo agoBack when I was a kid and paid any attention to the Bermuda Triangle myth (do kids still pay attention to it? I have no idea), we didn't have any idea about the details of Flight 19. It just got mushed into a vague "planes drop out of the sky". Because, I think, we didn't actually care about explaining anything. It was just fun to believe in spooky things, as you say.
- nephihaha 11mo agoNot sure what exactly is "comforting" about people going missing and presumably dying at sea.
- Tiberium 11mo agoIt looks to me that you're generating your comments entirely with LLMs? Lots of the general stylistic choices look very LLMish, especially looking over your history. A lot of "interesting point" repetitions too. Plus this comment is basically a summary of the article, not giving anything new, very much what LLMs often give you. It's interesting that no one commented on it before me, perhaps the HN crowd doesn't interact with LLMs enough :)
- joshuaheard 11mo agoI 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.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- nephihaha 11mo agoCompass anomalies around there do seem well attested. Pretty plausible explanation for why things have gone haywire there. Not the only place. I believe it is very hard to orientate yourself by landmarks around there too.
- nephihaha 11mo agoThere are better explanations than the vanilla call card of "conspiracy theory". One of them is that it is easy to get disorientated around there due a combination of many similar small islands in some areas and remote open ocean in another section, so it would be difficult to navigate by sight. There are also widespread reports of magnetic anomalies which would mess with compasses, and it is within the hurricane zone providing another possible cause.
- joshstrange 11mo agoWell I couldn’t get through that article on mobile. What a horrible website. Ads every paragraph, reflow of content while not even scrolling jumping the content around, header and footer and full page pop ups at various points. Ads rotating moving content around. Just insane.