SerpApi.Org
A search team located the wreckage of Pan American World Airways Flight 526A, the ill-fated Clipper Endeavor that ditched off Puerto Rico in 1952 and killed 52 of the 69 people aboard.
The aircraft was found resting nearly 2,000 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean after a seven-year search.
The Air/Sea Heritage Foundation announced the discovery Tuesday, saying the Douglas DC-4 was pinpointed by an autonomous underwater vehicle owned by Deep Sea Vision. CBS News and other outlets reported the find ahead of the 75th anniversary of the crash that reshaped commercial aviation safety.
The Clipper Endeavor departed San Juan's Isla Grande Airport on Good Friday, April 11, 1952, bound for New York's Idlewild Airport with 64 passengers and five crew members aboard.
Minutes after takeoff, engine failures forced the aircraft to ditch off Puerto Rico's northern coast.
Everyone aboard survived the impact, but the tail sheared off, the cabin flooded, and the plane sank in less than three minutes. Only 12 passengers and all five crew members were pulled from the heavy seas by U.S. Coast Guard and Air Force rescuers.
Investigators found that the panic that followed — passengers scrambling for life vests, a crew struggling with life rafts, and no coordinated evacuation — contributed as much to the death toll as the ditching itself.
The Civil Aeronautics Board, the FAA's predecessor, seized on those findings and pushed through sweeping reforms that led to the mandatory preflight safety briefing every commercial airline passenger now hears before takeoff.
"This one became a catalyst, and it helped drive safety steps forward of better flotation equipment and the preflight briefings," aviation safety expert John Cox, a pilot and founder of Safety Operating Systems, told CBS News. "This is one stepping stone along the path to what we today enjoy as aviation safety."
Air/Sea Heritage Foundation President Russ Matthews began pursuing the case in 2019 after reading about a luggage tag from the flight that had washed ashore in Florida.
His team combed through Pan Am and Coast Guard archives, along with Civil Aeronautics Board reports, before uncovering the decisive clue in the Archivo General de Puerto Rico: a chart drawn by Air Force pilots flying a training mission overhead when the DC-4 went down and who guided rescuers to the scene.
A 2024 search using a towed sonar array, filmed for the Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown," was scrubbed because of weather.
The breakthrough came in April, when Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo, whose father worked for Pan Am as both a mechanic and later a pilot, diverted a research vessel carrying a Kongsberg HUGIN autonomous underwater vehicle to the search area between two other assignments.
The drone located the fuselage and separated tail on its first pass over the roughly 10-square-nautical-mile search area on June 2.
A follow-up photographic survey confirmed the aircraft's identity, capturing Pan American's winged logo and the plane's name still legible on the fuselage.
The foundation said it is working with the Puerto Rican government to expand protections for the wreck site, which it considers a gravesite. It also has been in contact with victims' families and the two known living survivors.
The search will be featured in an upcoming episode of "Expedition Unknown" this fall.
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