Anyone watch "Bermuda Triangle" show Sunday? Q for airplane enthusiasts...

It smacked of bad science (as do most Discovery Channel shows lately), to the point of leaving all reason behind.

A question for airplane enthusiasts:
They seemed to find it a great mystery that five Navy planes were found 12 miles off Ft. Lauderdale a base, all within a 1.2 nautical mile radius. Based on ID numbers on the planes, they were determined NOT to be the aircraft from the Flight 19 of Bermuda Triangle infamy. As they put it, "These were other lost military aircraft that — by some bizarre coincidence — had crashed separately in the same area." Yet they had accident reports on all of these aircraft: two experienced engine failure and the others, it was implied, experienced "loss in altitude" (couldn't that also be termed "crashing"?). At least one of these crashes was survived by the pilots (they were not clear on the rest).

Now, I'm no expert on aviation. But it seems to me that there might be a number of sunken aircraft IN THE FLIGHT PATH of a naval air station used for training pilots. They implied the planes were lying neatly next to one another, but a 1.2 mile radius just 12 miles from the point of takeoff seems to me a likely place for planes to go down. It also seems that they found these five wreck sites and didn't bother to look elsewhere along the flight path. They stopped looking when they found 5 Avengers (they were looking for the mysterious Flight 19, which also consisted of 5 Avengers).

They commenced to do all kinds of experimentation attempting to pin the aircrafts' downings on the most ridiculous explanation: giant methane bubble releases, which reached up into the air and took down these five planes, all on separate occasions, just 12 miles off Ft. Lauderdale. Although large-scale methane releases have been hypothesized to occur in nature, there are no known methane deposits in this area (as they finally allowed a USGS geologist to briefly point out near the end of the show), and such releases of the type they were claiming, which could do such damage to planes IN THE AIR, are so highly based in conjecture as to be ridiculous.

Isn't it much more likely that pilot trainees have crashed many a plane in this flight path, and the causes are nothing more than run-of-the-mill equipment and pilot error? Isn't it also likely that if they were to look further up and down this flight path, they'd find numerous other sunken planes?

... they didn't spend as much time and energy investigating the "Rodan/Godzilla" possibility.

Seemed about just as likely to me.

Just to get rid of them. Ten of thousands of B-17's where built for WWII but only a handful still exist.

I saw a TV show some years ago that debunked the Bermuda Triangle. They tooka random area in the Eastern Atlantic the same size and shape as the Bermuda Triangle then checked insurance records. They found just as many ships and planes disappeared in the eastern region as in the Bermuda Triangle region.

tool around the Bermuda Triangle, searching for strange phenomenon. It was about 10 years ago. Funny, huh?

may be real pieces of weirdness happening in this region but, yes, the area's statistically not significantly different than anywhere else in losses...we;re talking about a vast expanse of water and it's just more heavily traveled than many areas. The Bermuda Triangle was named first in a '60s pulp magazine and kept alive by Charles Berlitz to sell copies of his subsequent book.

Strange things happen, but the Bermuda Triangle's a hoax. I know because I lived in it and found that no more of my socks and pens went missing than was the case Stateside.

though my marriage vanished while I was there/

But what do I know.

I was afraid it would be that bad.

What Bermuda Triangle theorists tend to forget that the entire city of Miami lies within it. So far as I've been able to determine through extensive research, the city of Miami still has not disappeared.