THE flight lasted less than nine minutes, the right two engines losing power in quick succession as the Douglas DC-4 made its initial climb from San Juan, Puerto Rico, en route to New York.
The pilot of the Pan American Clipper Endeavor had no choice but to ditch the plane at sea.
All 69 passengers and crew members survived the initial crash on April 11, 1952, only for panic and confusion to hit in the precious few minutes after the water landing.
The plane’s tail section broke off, and the fuselage sank, an accident that claimed 52 lives and became a catalyst for airline safety briefings and procedures for generations to come.
For nearly three-quarters of a century, the wreckage, which is similar in size to a Boeing 737, was lost in the abyss of the Atlantic Ocean.
But on June 2, after combing a dark expanse of the seafloor with an autonomous underwater vehicle, which resembles a torpedo and is equipped with sophisticated sonar and cameras, the breakthrough came, according to an exploration team.
There, 610m beneath the surface and 8km offshore, white letters spelled PAA against a blue backdrop of the winged globe logo of Pan American World Airways, the same one that the explorers said had appeared on the plane’s nose.
They were also able to make out the letters VOR in “Endeavor.” The rest of the word was caked over with debris from the elements and time.
“When those first photos came in, it was a shock,” Josh Gates, the host of Expedition Unknown on the Discovery Channel, who was involved in the project, said in an interview.
“It took my breath away because it was really beyond what I imagined we might see. The aircraft is so intact, and to see that aluminium, which doesn’t corrode, gleaming up at us from the bottom was just staggering.”
Pan Am Flight 526A, nicknamed the Easter Special, was heading to New York’s Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy International) on Good Friday when two of its four engines failed, according to the pilot’s testimony before a civil aeronautics board.
The pilot, John Burn, turned back towards San Juan, but the plane was quickly losing altitude over the ocean, forcing the crew to dump fuel and attempt an emergency water landing.
Many passengers refused to follow the captain’s orders to abandon the aircraft once it splashed down, staying buckled in their seats, the pilot told the board, adding that he had forcibly thrown some people into the water.
A language barrier also hampered the evacuation of the plane, according to historical accounts of survivors, who said rough seas and the threat of sharks in the water prompted some passengers to remain inside the cabin. Many of the victims drowned.
Safety briefings before takeoff and landing had not yet been required at the time of the accident, which became an impetus for new instructions about what passengers should do in the event of an emergency.
“It is an accident that fundamentally reshaped aviation as we know it,” Gates said.
Finding the wreckage of the Clipper Endeavor had become a preoccupation for the past seven years for Russ Matthews, the president and a co-founder of the non-profit Air/Sea Heritage Foundation, who played a central role in the project.
In an interview, Matthews said the water where the plane sank was too deep for divers to reach the wreckage.
Harsh weather added to the challenge, according to Matthews, who said the coronavirus pandemic had delayed the search.
“We had to wait a couple of years to get our shot,” he said.
In late spring, Matthews learned that the Fugro Brasilis, a survey ship, would be passing through the 26 square kilometre area that was the focus of the search for the Clipper Endeavor.
Aboard the vessel was an autonomous underwater vehicle, which is named Miss Millie and costs US$10mil to US$12mil. The torpedo-shaped probe can reach depths of 6,100m.
Matthews raced to the ship, along with Gates, who watched as the probe was lowered off a sled on the ship’s stern into the water.
Hard drives are housed inside a crushproof container inside the vehicle, which conducted a series of nearly 30 passes over the search area.
“We did run directly over a shipwreck that nobody knew was there,” Matthews said. “And it was like, well, that’s interesting, but, like, we’re looking for a plane, so let’s keep going.”
On the 13th pass, something else caught their attention: it resembled the tail section of an airplane.
A few hundred metres away from that appeared to be a fuselage, warranting a closer inspection of high-resolution photos of the wreckage.
The landing gear was visible. So were the windows of the main cabin.
“It’s a way to connect the present to the past,” Matthews said. “It’s the closest I will ever come to time travel.”
The group on the ship called Tony Romeo, CEO of Eco Minerals, an exploration company involved in the project, to report their find.
“I was very elated,” said Romeo, for whom the connection to Pan Am had special meaning. “My father was a Pan Am pilot.”
More than 350,000 photographs were taken of the wreckage, which was not disturbed, according to the exploration team, which said there were no plans to recover any remains from the site.
(Thirty-nine bodies were never recovered, they noted.)
“That is the only grave marker they are likely to ever have,” Matthews said. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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