We can't say for sure if any of the Avengers had their clocks mounted. Neither can we say for sure how many of the pilots had watchs, or if they performed a time hack prior to take-off.
None of us where there and surviving records are moot on both points.However, remember when this happened -
December 1945. The war had been over for some four months. Things weren't life-or-death anymore. A lot of guys were counting the minutes until they could get out. Kusche, in
The Disappearance of Flight 19, said it was common for departing pilots to take an Avenger's instrument panel clock as a souvenir, and most of the training Avengers on the flight line at Fort Lauderdale NAS were clockless. Does that mean that all of the planes in Flight 19 were without clocks? No way of telling.
Same thing with the pilot's wristwatches. All naval aviators were issued a Hamilton Standard wristwatch. Many bought their own watch of a different brand as a backup. Flight leader Taylor's frequent requests for time checks and queries about the time on a given course certainly seem to indicate that he had neither a cockpit clock or a wristwatch - but we have no way of knowing. Surviving records and recollections cannot answer that question. It was far less common for the enlisted crew to wear wristwatches.
Did the pilots do a time hack (time synchronization) before taking off? Again, surviving records are moot on that point. Kusche's book does imply that the navigation flights were getting fairly casual by December 1945, so perhaps they didn't, and no note was made of the fact that Taylor didn't have a watch.
The odds are, with five pilots, at least one of them had a wristwatch. But can we be absolutely certain? No.
And I tend to agree with the school of thought that says, Even if the Avengers
are found some day, it really doesn't answer any questions, especially WHY?. The only thing it will prove is that
Close Encounters of the Third Kind got it wrong.
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Topic: Flight 19 (Read 15657 times)
