A Bermudian mother and her child have not been seen since they left the island on a plane in the late 1940s.

Edward Gordon Smith, 87, said his aunt Margaret “Molly” Elsie and her two-year-old son, Mark, boarded the Star Ariel with 11 other passengers and seven crew on January 17, 1949.

The flight was bound for Kingston, Jamaica, but never made it there. Dozens of ships and planes searched for the missing Tudor IVB aircraft for days, but no wreckage, debris or bodies were found.

Mr Smith watched an episode of The Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters that centred on the flight’s disappearance, but said what happened remained a mystery.

It was shown on the History channel on January 31.

He explained: “They pressurised the plane, which was unusual for a passenger plane. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.

“They switched communication over to Jamaica early in the flight and it never worked, so I don’t know if it happened then or not.”

Mr Smith did not know his aunt well. He was 12 years old when she disappeared but he said she was born in Bermuda on July 16, 1909 and was his father’s youngest sibling.

Ms Smith, a nurse, married Briton Francis “Pip” H Marshall Mead, who worked for Cable & Wireless.

During the Second World War, the couple was stationed in the Seychelles and Myanmar (also known as Burma), where they became Japanese prisoners of war in 1943 and were separated.

They reunited after the war and had Mark, their only child, in Kingston in 1947.

For Christmas in 1948, Ms Smith took Mark to visit family in Bermuda she had not seen since the 1930s. She left on the plane the following month, never to be seen or heard from again.

The Chief Inspector of Accidents in Britain determined the cause of accident to be “unknown”.