It was December 27, 1948. A commercial flight from San Juan Puerto Rico to Miami Florida was returning with a plane load of, you guessed it, Snow Birds. The pilot, Captain Robert Lindquist, radioed Miami. They were fifty miles out and requesting landing instructions, or so the story goes. Miami radioed back with the instructions but got no reply. The plane which was just full of happy people singing Christmas Carols, vanished from the sky, never to be seen again.
The plane was not experiencing any radio troubles, and the pilot had made visual contact with Miami Tower but then just vanished. The weather was clear and calm, and the pilot and copilot both seasoned veterans. No sight of the plane wreckage was seen in the water south of Miami where the pilot had last radioed his position. Surely the wreckage of a plane would be seen in shallow water only twenty feet deep.
Fact 1: The plane's batteries would not hold a charge, and the pilot left San Juan even though the ground crew said he should replace them. The plane had been having difficulties with the radio ever since it had left Miami earlier in the morning. Since then, the DC3 had flown to San Juan and was now making the return trip to Miami. In all, the plane had been flying for close to twenty hours with the same crew and a radio that worked only intermittently, at best.
Fact 2: The Florida Straits have water close to 5,000 feet deep; the current is swift and deep. If the plane had gone down in the vicinity of where they claimed to have been, they would have crashed in water, which is neither still nor shallow. The current would have had over three hours to disperse debris before any search party had started.
Fact 3: The pilot gave an estimate of where he thought he was. The transcripts of the flight messages have no mention of seeing Miami. He was giving an estimate based on his flight time, speed, and weather conditions. Pilots are often as much as fifty miles off when reporting these distances. This means he could have been between fifty and one hundred miles away from Miami. The pilot said he was due South, yet if he was on course, he should have been east-southeast of Miami.
Fact 4: The wind direction had changed since the pilot had taken off. The new wind direction would have caused the plane to drift further to the West by as much as fifty miles, if he was not aware of it. Most likely he was not aware of it, because he was out of radio contact. He could transmit but it was not known if he could receive, because he never responded to any message (including those from San Juan at take off). This means he could have missed the entire southern tip of Florida and flown off only to crash in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fact 5: While the pilot had flown for sometime with other airlines in the area, this was his maiden flight with this airline. The copilot was also new to the route.