Wreckage of Pan Am Plane Found 74 Years Later

A long-lost Pan Am airliner has finally been found nearly three-quarters of a century after it vanished off Puerto Rico. A search team working with Discovery Channel's Expedition Unknown announced Tuesday that it located the Clipper Endeavor—Pan Am Flight 256—about 2,000 feet down in the Atlantic, using sonar and high-definition imaging to identify the Pan Am logo, landing gear, and an engine, reports Today. The plane crashed on April 11, 1952, roughly 10 minutes after taking off from San Juan bound for New York, after both right-side engines failed. Of the 69 people on board, only 17 survived, per CNN.

The Air/Sea Heritage Foundation has been hunting for the wreck since 2019, but its president, Russ Matthews, says the depth kept it out of reach until newer technology became available. An autonomous underwater drone, typically used to survey mineral fields, spotted the wreck on the team's first pass. Show host Josh Gates says pre-flight safety announcements by flight attendants were not the norm back then, and the crash helped change things. "There was no demonstration of where the exits were, where the flotation devices are," he says. "And so in all of that chaos and all that panic, 52 people drowned in and around this plane." The episode featuring the search is slated to air this fall.