Russ Matthews first took interest in Pan Am’s Clipper Endeavor in 2019 after seeing a blurb about a luggage tag from the flight washing ashore in Florida. That search led to wreckage being found off Puerto Rico 74 years after the crash that killed 52 people.
The discovery came last month, when explorers used an autonomous sonar drone to locate the fuselage and tail under about 2,000 feet of water. The finding also closes a long search tied to a DC-4 that sank within minutes after a hard landing on Good Friday in 1952, leaving 12 passengers and five crew members alive.
Russ Matthews and archives
Matthews, the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation president, pursued archival research with others at the foundation. He and others searched Pan Am Airlines and Coast Guard archives for clues, while records in Puerto Rico from a hearing on the crash helped identify the wreck site.
A map estimating the crash location made by Air Force pilots also helped pinpoint the area. A previous attempt in 2024 to locate the wreck with a towed sonar array was disrupted by bad weather, leaving the team to keep working toward a search it wanted finished before the 75th anniversary next year.
John Cox on safety changes
Aviation safety expert John Cox said the crash pushed changes that reached beyond the wreck site. “This one became a catalyst, and it helped drive safety steps forward of better flotation equipment and the preflight briefings,” he said.
He added, “So this is one steppingstone along the path to what we today enjoy as aviation safety. It was a rallying cry at the time.” Those changes are now part of routine flight operations, and the wreck adds another fixed point for families and researchers studying how the disaster shaped what passengers hear before takeoff.
Tony Romeo, the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, said one of his ships was passing by Puerto Rico in April between two other jobs while carrying an advanced underwater drone. The find leaves one main question open for the search team: what exactly was recovered beyond the fuselage and tail.
