A mystery surrounding a missing airplane has finally been solved.
After 74 years, we finally know what happened to Pan Am’s Clipper Endeavor.
The plane, a Douglas DC-4, disappeared about 10 minutes after it took off from San Juan, Puerto Rico, the “Today” show and The New York Times reported.
There were 69 passengers and crew on board Pan Am Flight 526A en route to what is now known as John F. Kennedy International Airport on Good Friday.
The plane lost both of its right-side engines just after takeoff, and it crashed shortly after.
Seventeen survived while the remaining 52 people were killed, the “Today” show reported.
Josh Gates with Discovery’s “Expedition Unknown” said that pre-flight safety briefings were not standard, leading to chaos once the plane hit the water. That changed in response to the plane’s crash.
“There was no demonstration of where the exits were, where the flotation devices are. And so in all of that chaos and all that panic, 52 people drowned in and around this plane,” Gates explained to the “Today” show.
The plane was finally found, about 2,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The Air/Sea Heritage Foundation has been trying to locate the Clipper Endeavor since 2019.
“It was really out of reach in 1952, and it really took until now for the technology to catch up, to be able to reach down,” the foundation’s president, Russ Matthews, said.
Using autonomous underwater drones last month, they found the plane, but the team had a tight deadline of only two days.
Luckily, on the first try, they found the wreckage about five miles from shore. The white letters of PAA and the winged globe logo of Pan American World Airways could be seen, as could the letters “VOR” from “Endeavor,” the Times reported.
“When those first photos came in, it was a shock,” Gates said. “It took my breath away because it was really beyond what I imagined we might see. You know, the aircraft is so intact, and to see that aluminum, which doesn’t corrode, you know, gleaming up at us from the bottom was just staggering.”
More than 350,000 photos were taken of the wreckage, which was not disturbed. There are also no plans to recover the remains of those killed in the crash.
“That is the only grave marker they are likely to ever have,” Matthews said, according to the Times.
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