Debris from Pan Am was found in Puerto Rico more than 70 years after the fatal crash

Debris was found from the Pan Am flight that crashed into the ocean off Puerto Rico in 1952, a crash that killed 52 people and helped lead to mandatory passenger safety regulations on commercial airliners.

Searchers recently found the wreckage of the DC-4 by using a self-propelled underwater vehicle equipped with high-resolution sonar to find the fuselage and tail separated in about 2,000 feet of water.

The Clipper Endeavor made a hard landing in the ocean after an engine failure shortly after taking off from San Juan, Puerto Rico, en route to New York City.

The 17 passengers and crew on board told investigators that everyone survived the descent, but many passengers struggled to find life vests and the crew had a hard time pulling life rafts. The plane sank within minutes.

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The Civil Aeronautics Board attributed the accident to poor maintenance which contributed to the engine failure and the pilot’s handling of the aircraft after losing power.

Fears from residents struggling to get hold of flotation devices have helped spur changes in aviation safety, including mandatory pre-flight briefings for passengers and improvements involving flotation devices.

The crash first caught the attention of Air/Sea Heritage Foundation President Russ Matthews in 2019 when he heard about a luggage tag from an airplane washing up on a beach in Florida and started digging deeper.

This led to years of combing the archives of Pan Am and the Coast Guard in search of clues about where the plane went missing. Reports from the Civil Aeronautics Board, the predecessor of the Federal Aviation Administration, also aided the search.

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The Pan American World Airways logo on the nose section of the Clipper Endeavor crash. (Air/Sea Heritage Foundation and Deep Sea Vision via AP)

However, the key to finding the crash was found in Puerto Rico records from the crash hearing and a map estimating the crash site made by Air Force pilots who saw the crash because they were in the area on a training flight.

Bad weather hampered a previous attempt two years ago to locate the hazards with a towed sonar array. Matthews said he and his volunteers wanted a second attempt to find it before the 75th anniversary of the crash of a newly developed plane originally designed for military use such as finding undersea mines.

Tony Romeo, CEO of the underwater exploration company Deep Sea Vision, had been talking to Matthews for some time about the possibility of helping to find the plane if one of his ships happened to be in the area. Then in April, one of the company’s ships was passing through Puerto Rico between two other missions while carrying a sophisticated underwater drone with the right sensors to detect the aircraft.

Air/Sea Heritage Foundation (ASHF) President Russ Matthews, ASHF Director Idee Matthews-Montijo, Josh Gates of Expedition Unknown and Deep Sea Vision President of Operations Craig Wallace inside the AUV hangar with the Explorers Club flag. (Discovery Channel via AP)

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“We were there, and everything came together at that time: good weather, the right team, and the right equipment and ship. So we took a shot at it,” said Romeo, whose father was a mechanic and Pan Am pilot.

Deep Sea Vision previously led the unsuccessful six-month search for Amelia Earhart’s plane.

All of the research done by Matthews’ team, along with weather data from the time of the crash, was combined to create a map of the most likely location and a 10 square mile search area. The drone found the remains at its original location, but searchers didn’t know until it returned to the surface with photos.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.