First discovered inside High Strangeness last summer, Flight 19 is finally cleared for a full release!

Scent Profile

Top: Orange, Grapefruit, Immortelle

Middle: Flint, Pepper, Geranium

Base: Cedarwood, Amber, Vetiver, Patchouli & Benzoin

Find The Flight 19 Collection HERE!

Some of you may remember Flight 19 from last summer’s High Strangeness: Bermuda Triangle Advent Calendar. That was the first and only place this PAA Original Fine Fragrance has ever appeared.

Flight 19 was created specifically for High Strangeness, where each fragrance explored another corner of Bermuda Triangle history, folklore and outright weirdness. I knew I liked this one when I finished it, but what I did not expect was how many people would single it out afterward and ask whether it would ever get a proper release of its own!

Those requests never really stopped.

So, almost like wreckage finally washing ashore after disappearing somewhere beyond the horizon, Flight 19 is finally getting its first-ever full PAA collection release COMING SOON!

If you experienced it in last summer’s calendar, you already know the fragrance. If you missed High Strangeness, this will be the first opportunity to experience Flight 19 outside that very limited release!

Before we get into what it smells like, however, we really should open the original file, because the actual story behind Flight 19 is fascinating enough before the PAA version starts interfering with the evidence.

DECEMBER 5, 1945

Shortly after 2:00 in the afternoon, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers lifted off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale for what should have been an ordinary training flight over the Atlantic.

Their assigned exercise was officially designated “Navigation Problem No. 1,” a routine bombing and overwater navigation training mission. (what's in a name?) The planned route took the formation east from Florida to Hens and Chickens Shoals, where the pilots would conduct low-level practice bombing, before continuing across the Bahamas and eventually turning back toward Fort Lauderdale.

There were fourteen men aboard the five Avengers. The flight was led by Lieutenant Charles C. Taylor, a combat veteran who had accumulated more than 2,500 hours of flying time, including more than 600 hours in the Avenger. The other pilots were advanced trainees and were considerably less experienced.

A Premonition or Something Else?

There is also one small detail from that morning that becomes hard to ignore once you know what happened later. Taylor reportedly arrived for the flight and asked that another instructor take his place. He gave no reason, and no replacement was available, so he flew the mission as scheduled. It may have meant absolutely nothing, but history has a habit of making perfectly ordinary moments feel a little different once you know how the day ends.

The practice bombing portion of the exercise appears to have gone normally. Afterward, things began to unravel.

Radio communications indicated that Taylor had become uncertain of the formation’s position. His compasses appeared to be giving him trouble, and he seems to have mistaken the islands below for a different part of the Bahamas or perhaps the Florida Keys. That mistake mattered enormously, because the direction Taylor believed would take them toward Florida may instead have been carrying the formation farther out over the Atlantic.

Ground personnel attempted to establish Flight 19’s position and help guide them home while the pilots debated where they were. The afternoon wore on, the weather deteriorated, and the fuel situation became increasingly serious. Eventually, the radio transmissions faded away. Flight 19 never came home.

No confirmed trace of the five Avengers or the fourteen men aboard has ever been found. The Navy’s historical assessment points toward disorientation, navigation problems, worsening conditions and eventual fuel exhaustion as the most likely chain of events, but the exact fate of Flight 19 has never been conclusively established. And unfortunately, the story did not end with the Avengers.

As the Navy realized Flight 19 was in trouble, search aircraft were dispatched to locate them. One of those aircraft was a Martin PBM Mariner carrying thirteen men. It took off from Naval Air Station Banana River and disappeared shortly afterward.

Unlike Flight 19, there is considerable evidence suggesting what happened to the Mariner. A ship in the area reported seeing a flaming aircraft fall from the sky, and the PBM was known to have problems with gasoline vapor accumulating inside the aircraft. The Navy therefore considers a catastrophic in-flight fire the probable explanation for its loss.

By the end of December 5, twenty-seven servicemen aboard six military aircraft were gone.

One of the largest air and sea searches of its kind followed, yet no confirmed wreckage from Flight 19 was recovered! The mystery eventually became inseparable from a name that did not even exist when those Avengers disappeared.

"The Bermuda Triangle" Was Born.

The phrase itself was popularized almost two decades later, when Vincent Gaddis published “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” in Argosy magazine in 1964. Flight 19 was pulled directly into the growing mythology, and from there the story took on a second life.

People began proposing increasingly exotic explanations for disappearances in the region. UFOs entered the discussion, magnetic anomalies were blamed, and eventually just about every paranormal theory capable of surviving salt water found its way into the Triangle.

Flight 19 became one of its greatest stories because there has never been a satisfying final scene. No resolve...

We can construct a very reasonable explanation for what probably happened. Navigation errors over open ocean can become catastrophic very quickly, especially when weather and fuel are working against you.

But there is still one wonderfully frustrating problem. We still do not have the airplanes.

That space between what probably happened and what can actually be proven has kept Flight 19 alive for more than eighty years. And this is where I need to warn you that we are about to leave respectable aviation history behind. Because Phoenix Shaving has another file. [From The PhoeniX Files.]

THEN THERE’S THE MYSTERIOUS SIXTH AIRCRAFT...

The official record tells us that five Avengers left Fort Lauderdale that afternoon. The PhoeniX Files tells the story a little differently. According to our version of events, somewhere over the Atlantic another aircraft appeared alongside Flight 19.

Nobody in the formation was expecting another plane to join them, and there was no corresponding aircraft assigned to their exercise. Nevertheless, this mysterious sixth aircraft was suddenly there, matching their course as though it had been flying with them from the beginning!

Attempts to identify it produced nothing useful. There was no call sign and no response to the pilots’ efforts to establish contact. The strange aircraft simply remained with them.

Not long afterward, the navigation problems began. The pilots became increasingly uncertain about their position, and the geography below them seemed impossible to reconcile with where their instruments and calculations said they should be.

Then someone saw something ahead of the formation that was considerably harder to explain. Suspended above the Atlantic was a perfectly black cube. There were no visible wings or engines, and nothing about the object suggested how it remained airborne. It seemed almost motionless against the sky at first, a geometric absence hanging where nothing should have been! Then the cube moved.

According to the file, the mysterious sixth aircraft changed course toward it. Flight 19 followed. As the formation continued farther out over the Atlantic, their radio transmissions became increasingly confused until eventually there was nothing left to hear. The five Avengers disappeared.

Whatever had joined their formation disappeared with them. And the black cube was never mentioned in any official account. Naturally.

Now, before somebody emails me demanding a Freedom of Information Act request for “the cube documents,” I should probably remind everyone that we have officially crossed over into PAA mythology. Then again, that is exactly what they would want me to say. (Things that make you go Hmmm.)

CREATING THE SCENT OF FLIGHT 19

When we created Flight 19 for High Strangeness, Fran and I knew immediately what we did not want to do. We did not want another predictable ocean fragrance.

Yes, Flight 19 disappeared over the Atlantic, but this story has never been about relaxing beside the water. I wanted the fragrance to feel like an ordinary afternoon that slowly begins slipping out of alignment. The opening needed to feel familiar enough that you would willingly follow it before realizing that somewhere along the way the coordinates had changed. (hee, hee, hee)

Flight 19 begins with Orange and Grapefruit, giving the fragrance a bright opening, but the addition of Immortelle changes the character almost immediately. Immortelle has an unusual dry warmth to it that can feel sun-baked and almost otherworldly when placed against citrus. It creates the first little crack in an otherwise familiar landscape. (Consider Immortelle that mysterious, phantom 6th plane.)

As the fragrance develops, Flint, Pepper and Geranium begin to emerge. The Flint accord was particularly important to me because it gives Flight 19 a mineral quality with an almost electrically charged dryness. Geranium introduces a living aromatic greenness while the Pepper adds warmth and tension without turning the fragrance into an obvious spice bomb. (the static, the event)

Then the base begins pulling everything downward through Cedarwood, Amber, Vetiver, Patchouli and Benzoin. The brighter opening recedes as woods, earth and resin take over, giving Flight 19 considerably more depth than you might expect when you first put it on. (Gravity)

That progression is probably my favorite thing about the fragrance. It does not announce that something strange is about to happen. It simply keeps moving until you eventually realize you are no longer standing where you started. Which seems rather appropriate, no?

For those who like seeing the entire scent structure at a glance, Flight 19 opens with Orange, Grapefruit and Immortelle, moves through Flint, Pepper and Geranium, and settles into Cedarwood, Amber, Vetiver, Patchouli and Benzoin.

Despite the story surrounding it, Flight 19 was always intended to stand on its own as a fine fragrance. The Bermuda Triangle gave us a wonderful atmosphere to work inside, but we were not interested in creating something that only made sense as a novelty scent attached to a cool label. It needed to smell good after you forgot the story.

Judging by how many people began asking about it after High Strangeness, I think we managed that.

NOW FLIGHT 19 FINALLY GETS THE FULL TREATMENT! (you're welcome!)

For those who have been "F19 Curious" since the advent calendar, your persistence has finally altered the flight plan! For everyone who missed High Strangeness, this is your first chance to find out what everybody was talking about!

FLIGHT 19: A PAA Original Fine Fragrance [Disclaimer: The historical portions of this story are based upon the documented disappearance of Flight 19 and the PBM Mariner search aircraft. The mysterious sixth aircraft, black cube and related events belong to the considerably less official PhoeniX Files Archives.]

_________________________

Absolutely zero parabens, propylene glycol, alcohol or triclosan can be found in our creations

In all Field trials they have passed with flying colors: first dates, cocktail parties, camping, tight rope walking and the random briss...never failed once. Made with the purest & highest quality ingredients on earth.

Our deodorants are handcrafted one batch at a time.  We use the best ingredients we can find to bring you a superior product.

NOTE: This is DEODORANT not Antiperspirant!

Ingredients: Coconut Oil, Beeswax, Cocoa Butter, Arrowroot Powder, Shea Butter, Sodium Bicarbonate, Zinc Oxide, Organic Non GMO Corn Starch, Kaolin Clay, Organic Avocado Oil, Cape Aloe Powder,  Potassium Alum, Essential Oils and/or Fragrance

Handmade in Arizona, USA

Net Wt. 2.5oz.