A group of Avengers appears in the opening scene of Steven Spielberg 's 1977 sci-fi film '' Close Encounters of the Third Kind '' . In the scene , a group of officials arrive at an isolated cantina in Mexico 's Sonora Desert where the five Avengers of ' Flight-19 ' have mysteriously appeared overnight . Flight 19 was the infamous training flight of five TBMs that vanished without trace after taking off from Fort Lauderdale , Florida , on 5 December 1945 . One of the TBMs featured in the scene was the TBM-3E ( BuNo '' 53503 '' ) now owned and flown by the Rocky Mountain Wing of the Commemorative Air Force ( CAF )
Flight 19
Flight 19
Aircraft in fiction