Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!veritas!amdcad!amdcad!military From: KARYPM%SJUVM@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Paul M. Karagianis) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: WWII multi-element ditching procedures. Message-ID: <1991May18.050451.9723@amd.com> Date: 17 May 91 15:49:05 GMT Sender: military@amd.com Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Lines: 32 Approved: military@amd.com From: "Paul M. Karagianis" There were reports on last nights news that treasure hunters had found five Avengers off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, presumably the unit that "vanished in the Bermuda triangle" at the end of WWII. I don't recall, and am not all that interested in the exact details of this popular ghost story, which must be pretty well known since it's included in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" with almost no background. What I found interesting was that "all five aircraft were found within two miles of each other". As an uninformed layman on the subject of survival strategies, I could use some explanation of what appears to be a suicidal choice. The variation in fuel consumption between several medium range aircraft operated to exhaustion would suggest that when the first one went down, the remaining four would have an average of several minutes fuel remaining; obviously they chose to remain together. I don't understand why five little life rafts clumped together in the middle of the ocean would be any more likely to be discovered than one. As a (probably sub-optimal) alternative, wouldn't it make more sense to designate the first guy dry as a hub and immediately split the remaining four N, E, W and S? In that case they would still have four independent low probability chances of making land, air or sea contact plus they would be spread over a much wider area, decreasing the odds against rescue units. Locating any of the four would give a pretty good fix on the hub: "yeah, he's exactly 14 minutes magnetic south" (I'm making a possibly bogus assumption that ditching is a *relatively* low risk hazard), and reduce the search area to rather small pie slices on the remaining three. Thank for the consideration... -Kary.