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On this day in 1949, the BSSA passenger plane Star Ariel departed Bermuda bound for Kingston, Jamaica, and vanished into the Bermuda Triangle. Almost exactly a year earlier, the Star Tiger did the same thing.
There are plausible explanations for the loss of the Star Tiger. Besides bad weather, there might have been a fire from a faulty heater. Chillingly, communication with the pilots also hinted at a terrible mistake-in-the-making. Because of the strong headwinds, the Star Tiger was flying very low, at 2,000 feet. But in their radio communications, the pilots always reported themselves at the more common flight level of 20,000 feet. Not only does an altitude of only 2,000 feet give you very little room to respond when something goes wrong with the plane, but it’s possible the pilots actually forgot they were flying so low, and simply flew into the ocean while descending. (This is called controlled flight into terrain and thinking you are at a higher altitude than you are is a major cause of it.)
The Star Ariel, however, was a normal flight. The weather was fine. The flight altitude was 18,000 feet. The only problems were transitory radio issues. And yet the plane vanished. Neither flight sent a distress call (that was received, anyway) and no wreckage was ever found.
Obviously, there are logical reasons that planes go missing over the ocean, and Tudors in particular. (There were 38 Tudor planes manufactured, and seven of them crashed.)
But we’re not looking for logic! We’re here for Bermuda Triangle writing prompts. And here’s one right now:
The undiscovered country. Maybe the planes actually just crashed. But maybe it’s not the crashes themselves that make the Bermuda Triangle so freaky (because in reality, planes and ships don’t go missing in the Triangle any more than they do anywhere else)— maybe the reason that the Triangle unsettles people so much is that something weird happens there after you crash. Perhaps you end up in limbo, or a time loop, or in a city beneath the waves. You could get reincarnated as someone always doomed to die in a mishap at sea. Maybe you become a sea monster that wants to eat planes.
Read the rest of the article and prompts
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