The wreckage of a Pan Am flight that plunged into the sea off Puerto Rico in 1952 has been found. Fifty-two people were killed in the accident, which led to passenger safety briefings given on every commercial flight.
The Clipper Endeavor made a hard landing after losing engine power shortly after take off from the Caribbean archipelago. The 17 passengers and crew who lived told investigators everyone on board survived the landing, but panic set in as many passengers struggled to find life vests and the crew had a hard time pulling out life rafts. Within minutes, the plane sank.
Discovery using sonar drone
Explorers found the wreckage of the DC-4 by using an autonomous sonar drone to locate the fuselage and tail under 2,000 feet of water.
Aviation safety expert John Cox, a pilot and founder of Safety Operating Systems, said the accident helped the introduction of better flotation devices and pre-flight briefings. He added: "So this is one stepping stone along the path to what we today enjoy as aviation safety. It was a rallying cry at the time."
Hope for other crash families
The discovery of the wreck could offer fresh hope for families who lost loved ones in other ocean crashes, including Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which disappeared 12 years ago with 269 people aboard.
This crash first caught the attention of Russ Matthews in 2019 when he saw a blurb about a luggage tag from the flight washing ashore in Florida. He said the historical significance of the Clipper Endeavor prompted him to dig deeper.
Search using archives and map
That led to years of searching through Pan Am Airlines and Coast Guard archives looking for clues about the location of the plane's watery grave. Reports from the US Civil Aeronautics Board, which was the predecessor to the United States' Federal Aviation Administration also helped.
But the key to finding the wreckage was found in records in Puerto Rico from a hearing held about the crash and a map estimating its location from US Air Force pilots who witnessed the crash while they were on a training flight.
Second attempt with advanced drones
Bad weather disrupted a previous bid to locate the wreck in 2024 with a towed sonar array that was also documented by the Discovery Channel's Expedition Unknown show.
Mr Matthews said he and the volunteers who work with his Air/Sea Heritage Foundation dreamed of making a second attempt to find it before next year's 75th anniversary of the crash. The team used newer, advanced drones originally developed for military uses, such as finding undersea mines.
Deep Sea Vision involvement
Tony Romeo, chief exec of the undersea exploration firm Deep Sea Vision, had been talking with Mr Matthews for a while about the possibility of helping try to find the plane if one of his ships was ever in the area. In April, one happened to be passing right by Puerto Rico while carrying an advanced underwater drone with the right sensors to be able to find it.
Mr Romeo said: "There we were and everything kind of came together at the moment: good weather, the right team and the right equipment and ship. So we took a shot at it."
Deep Sea Vision previously led an unsuccessful six-month search to find Amelia Earhart's plane, but Mr Romeo had a special interest in this case because his father was a mechanic and pilot for Pan Am airlines. In fact, the drone they used in the search already had a Pan Am sticker on the side.
Search area and discovery
All the research Mr Matthews' group had done, combined with weather data from the time of the crash, was synthesised to create a map of the most likely location and a search area of 10 square nautical miles. The drone actually found the wreckage on its first pass over the area although the explorers didn't know until it returned to the surface with its images.
The Discovery Channel’s Josh Gates and his crew were along again for this latest search to capture the moment the plane appeared in drone images after they were downloaded. The search will be featured in a special episode of the show, but a few highlights released on Tuesday show the moment everyone in the control room realised what they had found. Cries of "Oh God!" and "That's a plane!" erupted when the image loaded on screen.
Mr Gates said: "To have a front-row seat to an expedition like this as it’s unfolding is tremendous and so I feel really lucky that we were able to be a part of it."
