Pan Am's Clipper Endeavor found 74 years after plane crash that killed 52 people
An aviation search team has found the wreckage of a plane that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean more than seven decades ago, the Discovery Channel announced in a TODAY exclusive.
The team, whose efforts are chronicled in an upcoming episode of Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown,” located the Pan Am aircraft, dubbed the Clipper Endeavor, some 2,000 feet in the water off Puerto Rico. The plane went down about 10 minutes into its flight from San Juan on April 11, 1952. Sixty-nine passenger and crew members were onboard; 52 people died, and 17 survived.
Using sonar and high-definition images, the team found the Pan Am logo, the plane’s landing gear and engine, solving a nearly 75-year aviation mystery and concluding years of search efforts.
Pan Am Flight 256 was headed to what is now known as John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City on Good Friday. Shortly after takeoff, pilots lost both of the plane’s right-side engines. Nine minutes later, the plane crashed.
Flight attendant safety briefings were not yet standard on planes.
“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,” “Expedition Unknown” host Josh Gates told TODAY.
The aircraft remained on the ocean floor for 74 years. Since 2019, the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation has been working on tracking down the wreckage.
“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,” Air/Sea Heritage Foundation President Russ Matthews said.
Last month, Gates and Matthews were presented the opportunity to use an autonomous underwater drones — which is normally used for surveying gas and mineral fields — for two days to locate the plane.
“We were against the clock on this, and we knew we had kind of an idea, a pretty nice box, search box, that we wanted to search,” Eco Minerals CEO Tony Romeo told TODAY.
The team was able to spot the plane on its first attempt.
After the crash of the Clipper Endeavor, pre-flight safety briefings became mandatory.
“Whether you’re going on vacation, going home for the holidays, or you’re a business traveler — every time you set foot on a plane, you owe a debt to what happened to Clipper Endeavor,” Gates said.
The “Expedition Unknown” episode about the Clipper Endeavor is scheduled to air in the fall.
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