The wreckage of a Pan Am flight that plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Puerto Rico greater than 70 years ago in an accident that shaped industrial aviation safety procedures has been found.
Last month, explorers discovered the wreckage of Flight 526A that crashed off San Juan, Puerto Rico, in April 1952, on its technique to Recent York City, using a sonar drone to locate the fuselage, which was lying 2,000 feet below the water’s surface.
The plane, the Clipper Endeavor, which was roughly the identical size as a Boeing 737, was carrying 69 passengers and crew when it made a tough landing on water after losing each engines lower than 10 minutes after takeoff, in keeping with the Air Sea Heritage Foundation, which announced the invention.
Everyone initially survived the accident, but 52 died when the aircraft’s tail broke away and the fuselage sank.
This undated image provided by the Pan Am Historical Foundation/John Johnson Collection on Tuesday, July 21, 2026, shows the Clipper Endeavor.
Pan Am Historical Foundation/John Johnson Collection via AP
The 17 passengers and crew who survived told investigators that panic set in as people struggled to search out life vests and the crew were unable to locate life rafts.
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The accident set the precedent for modern-day safety instructions, where flight crews are obligated to discover the plane’s exits and inform passengers on the placement of life vests and easy methods to inflate them.
“This one became a catalyst, and it helped drive safety steps forward of higher flotation equipment and the preflight briefings,” aviation safety expert John Cox, a pilot and founding father of Safety Operating Systems, told The Associated Press.
“So that is one stepping stone along the trail to what we today enjoy as aviation safety. It was a rallying cry on the time,” he added.
It took extensive research to locate the plane’s sunken carcass, however the moment that led to its discovery dates back to 2019, when Russ Matthews, a historian and explorer specializing in aeronautical and maritime subjects and president of the Air Sea Heritage Foundation, read a blurb a few luggage tag from the ill-fated flight that washed up on a Florida beach, The Associated Press reported.
While he was researching a unique Pan Am incident on the time, the scrap of evidence prompted a deep dive into Pan Am Airlines and Coast Guard archives, where Matthews and his colleagues scoured for clues in regards to the plane’s watery grave. Reports from the Civil Aeronautics Board, the predecessor to the Federal Aviation Administration, also directed him toward the crash site.
This undated composite image provided by the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation and Deep Sea Vision on Tuesday, July 21, 2026, shows the Clipper Endeavor wreck.
Air/Sea Heritage Foundation and Deep Sea Vision via AP
Speaking on his research in a news release published by the Air Sea Heritage Foundation, Matthews said he was “astonished that such a crucial story had largely faded from public memory.”
“The story is so powerful and the impact so far-reaching. We’re all stunned and elated by this discovery yet also humbled to recollect what happened in that place so way back,” he added.
The important thing to finding the wreckage lay in records from a hearing in Puerto Rico in regards to the incident and a map drawn by trainee pilots, who estimated the aircraft’s location after witnessing it go down during a training flight, in addition to from survivor testimony and real-time radio transcripts.
An try to locate the plane was interrupted in 2024 by bad weather, but Matthews and a team of volunteers who work along with his foundation were set on making a second attempt. Through a collaboration with the undersea exploration firm Deep Sea Vision, they used a military drone designed to locate underwater mines to pinpoint the wreckage, which the drone found on its first pass of the search area.
“There we were, and all the things type of got here together in the mean time: good weather, the best team, and the best equipment and ship. So we took a shot at it,” Tony Romeo, the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, told the AP.
Deep Sea Vision previously led an unsuccessful six-month search to search out Amelia Earhart’s plane, but Romeo had a special interest within the Pan Am case because his father was a mechanic and pilot for the airline and the drone utilized in the search already had a Pan Am sticker on the side.
Its discovery comes ahead of the seventy fifth anniversary of its disappearance. Finding it before the anniversary was the goal, Matthews said.
In a statement on Instagram, Matthews recalled saying to the team, “‘This time next 12 months is the seventy fifth anniversary of the Clipper Endeavour accident, so we really want to search out this plane.’ And in June, we did.” He added that the invention has also brought peace to relations of those that died within the accident.
“What means essentially the most is reading the nice and cozy and heartfelt responses from the impacted families whose family members were aboard flight 526A,” the statement reads. “52 people lost their lives throughout the Clipper Endeavor tragedy, and with the ability to find their resting place and reconnect families with their family members is incredibly humbling and an awesome honor,” it concluded.
— with files from The Associated Press
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