Josh Funk
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.
The talks flight attendants deliver about how to inflate a life vest or find the exits on a plane that are routine today were developed after 52 people perished aboard Pan Am’s Clipper Endeavour because they didn’t get off the plane before it sank. Explorers used an autonomous sonar drone to find the fuselage and tail of the DC-4 last month under 600 metres of water.
Pan Am flight 526A suffered multiple engine failures and crashed shortly after take-off from San Juan-Isla Grande Airport in Puerto Rico on April 11, 1952.
The 12 passengers and five crew members who survived told investigators that everyone survived the plane’s ditching into the sea, but panic then set in, and many passengers were reluctant to venture out into the waves as they struggled to find life vests and the crew had difficulty deploying life rafts. The plane sank within minutes.
“This one became a catalyst, and it helped drive safety steps forward of better flotation equipment and the pre-flight briefings,” said aviation safety expert John Cox. “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.”
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 239 people aboard.
Malaysia last month extended its contract with marine robotics company Ocean Infinity for a deep-sea search of more than 7000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean for the Boeing 777’s wreckage.
An expensive multinational search failed to turn up any clues to its location, although debris washed ashore on the East African coast and Indian Ocean islands. A private search in 2018, by Ocean Infinity, also found nothing.
Wreckage found
The Clipper Endeavour crash first caught Russ Matthews’ attention in 2019 when he heard about a luggage tag from the flight washing ashore in Florida. He said the historical significance of the crash prompted him to dig deeper.
That led to years of digging through the Pan Am Airways and US Coast Guard archives looking for clues about the plane’s seabed resting place. 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 in records from a hearing held on the crash, and in a map estimating its location made by US Air Force pilots who witnessed it because they 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 chief executive of the undersea exploration firm Deep Sea Vision, had been discussing 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. Then, in April, one just happened to be passing Puerto Rico between other jobs while carrying an advanced underwater drone with the right sensors 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 Airways. The drone they used in the search already had a Pan Am sticker on the side.
All the research 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 (34 square kilometres).
The drone actually found the wreckage on its first pass over that area, although the explorers didn’t know that until it returned to the surface with its images.
The Discovery Channel’s episode on the discovery is due to air this northern hemisphere autumn.
