The wreckage from a Pan Am plane crash in the ocean 74 years ago that helped lead to requirements for the passenger safety briefings on every flight today has been found off the coast of Puerto Rico. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.
Explorers used an autonomous sonar drone to find the fuselage and tail of the DC-4 last month under 2,000 feet of water.
The 12 passengers and five crew members who survived the crash on Good Friday in 1952 told investigators that everyone survived the plane's hard landing on the water, but then panic set in and many passengers were reluctant to venture out into the waves as they struggled to find life vests and the crew had a hard time pulling the rafts out. The plane sank within minutes.
"This one became a catalyst, and it helped drive safety steps forward of better flotation equipment and the preflight briefings," said aviation safety expert John Cox. "So this is one steppingstone along the path to what we today enjoy as aviation safety. It was a rallying cry at the time."
And now the discovery of this wreck could offer new hope for families who lost loved ones in other ocean crashes like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that 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.
That led to years of digging through the Pan Am Airlines and Coast Guard archives looking for clues about the location of the plane's watery grave. Reports from the Civil Aeronautics Board, which was the predecessor to the Federal Aviation Administration, also helped.
But the key to finding the wreckage was found in records in Puerto Rico from a hearing that was held on the crash, and a map estimating the location of the crash that was done by Air Force pilots who witnessed the crash because they just happened to be in the area on a training flight.
Bad weather disrupted a previous attempt to locate the wreck in 2024 with a towed sonar array that was also documented by the Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown" show. But 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 with one of these newer advanced drones that were originally developed for military uses like finding undersea mines.
Tony Romeo, who is CEO of the undersea exploration firm Deep Sea Vision, had been talking with Matthews for a while about the possibility of helping try to find this plane if one of his ships was ever in the area, and then in April one just happened to be passing right by Puerto Rico between two other jobs while carrying an advanced underwater drone with the right sensors to be able to find it.
"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," Romeo said.
Deep Sea Vision previously led an unsuccessful six-month search to find Amelia Earhart's plane, but Romeo had a special interest in this case because his father was a mechanic and pilot for Pan Am airlines.