Original subtitles

[Russ] PanAm defined air travel.

And this accident changed aviation forever.

And yet it has been almost completely forgotten.

[Russ] Shortly after takeoff,

he hears what he thinks are explosions.

Nobody knows what to do.

So now I presume it's chaos.

We also find information that can lead us

to where this happened.

We've actually discovered here in the archive a map

showing the route of the plane,

including where they think it went down.

That indicates the crash location?

Yes.

So this aircraft is just sitting in the deep somewhere?

[Russ] That's right.

Just waiting to be found.

[Josh] Show me this map.

What did you find in the archives?

[Russ] This is it.

Or the technology we're bringing to bear,

this is going to give us the best chance

to find Clipper Endeavor.

Conditions don't look great.

Wind is picking up.

Getting bad out.

Can we sonar scan in this?

[man] We're going to go for it.

[Josh] There's something wrong out there.

Ooh, what is that?

[Russ] Let's see what it is.

Heading down.

Oh, oh, oh, something there.

What is that?

[woman] Please take a moment to find the exit nearest to you.

In the unlikely event of a water landing,

you'll find a flotation device beneath your seat.

We hear this announcement on every flight.

Many people tune it out.

But the pre-flight safety briefing

has saved countless lives.

And yet, it wasn't always there.

We can trace its origin back to one tragic accident.

On April 11, 1952, PanAm Airways Clipper Endeavor

departs from San Juan, Puerto Rico,

a routine flight bound for New York with 69 souls aboard.

And nine terrifying minutes later,

the plane crashes into the Atlantic.

Miraculously, everyone on board survives the impact.

And that could and should be the end of the story.

But the passengers haven't received a safety briefing.

And many panic.

In the chaos, 52 people drown.

This disaster changed aviation forever.

Every time you fly, you are safer

because of what happened to this plane

and her passengers 70 years ago.

Yet despite the small area in which it could have crashed,

Clipper Endeavor has never been found.

A phantom lost in incredibly deep water

thousands of feet beneath the waves.

But all that may be about to change.

A group of aircraft hunters known as Air Sea Heritage

has just discovered long-lost documents

and forgotten eyewitness accounts.

Pinpointing the location of the plane

and with a state-of-the-art research vessel

armed with high-resolution sonar

and a remotely operated vehicle,

the team is about to launch a mission to scour the seabed

off the coast of Puerto Rico.

So ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts

and place your seatbacks and tray tables

in their full upright position.

We'll be arriving shortly in San Juan in search

of a legendary lost aircraft, the Clipper Endeavor.

The past is all around us.

Oh, this is crazy.

A world of mystery...

This is a plane.

-[man] Yeah. -[laughs]

...danger...

We are about to be underwater.

Whoa!

...and adventure.

It's just straight down!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

I travel to the far corners of the Earth

to uncover where legends end.

[screams, laughs]

...and history begins.

Okay, let's punch in.

I'm Josh Gates,

and this is Expedition Unknown.

Hola from sunny San Juan, Puerto Rico,

where my search for the lost Clipper Endeavor is officially on.

Spanish for "rich port," Puerto Rico is exactly that.

A swashbuckling stunner and a treasure trove of history.

Nope, it's still not a state

and still not sure it wants to be.

But this is the only American territory

that Christopher Columbus ever actually visited.

The pastel painted streets of old San Juan

are bursting with color, a healthy dose of humidity,

and Caribbean flavor.

And keeping guard over the city

is a 500-year-old Spanish fortress at Morro Bay.

Back in the 1950s, San Juan was in the midst

of one of its many transformations.

As the economy shifted from agriculture to industry,

hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans

left seeking higher wages.

Now many of them landed in New York.

And for more on that, see West Side Story.

[dramatic music playing]

Sorry, anyway, in this rapidly modernizing world,

you've got Puerto Ricans flying north,

and you've got jet-setters on the mainland

flying south to this tropical paradise.

Travel and tourism boomed, and one airline led the way.

PanAm.

The airline that came to define the glamour

and excitement of air travel was also an airline of firsts.

The first US airline to operate

an international flight in 1927.

The first to fly a sitting president,

and the first to fly around the world.

And in the 1950s, PanAm developed economy-class

passenger service to make flying more affordable.

One Douglas DC-4, dubbed the Clipper Endeavor,

was given the popular route

between New York and Puerto Rico.

On April 11, 1952, the company offered

a special $64 Easter fare on Flight 526A

for Puerto Ricans eager to spend the holiday

with their family and friends in New York.

Unfortunately, the flight never arrived.

Nine minutes after Clipper Endeavor took off from San Juan,

it soared overhead and then crashed

somewhere out there in the Atlantic Ocean.

For 72 years, she has remained in water so deep

that no modern search has ever been mounted.

Now, one team is leading the charge

to find this legendary plane.

Outside the National Library of Puerto Rico,

I meet fellow Explorers Club member Russ Matthews.

-Josh. Hey! -Hey!

-How are you, man? -Good. Good to see ya.

Great to see you, too.

Russ is the president and co-founder

of the Air Sea Heritage Foundation,

dedicated to investigating and preserving historical wrecks

related to aviation and maritime history.

And that brings us to PanAm Clipper Endeavor.

[Russ] That's right.

What got you interested in this story?

-Well, I was actually researching other incidents -Yeah.

and came across this story that I'd actually never heard before.

I had never heard of this either.

Which is crazy. I mean, this is what we do.

-Right -Yeah.

[Russ] And, you know, the more I looked into it,

the more and more compelling it became.

This accident changed aviation forever.

Right. And yet it has been almost completely forgotten.

It has. We've been working on this for five years.

Wow. Five years of research.

-That's right. -Okay.

Here, actually, in the archives here in Puerto Rico,

there is a wealth of information.

There is a whole paper trail.

And I think within those documents

are the keys to finding this plane.

-Can I see it? -Yeah. Let's go.

Come on.

The archive contains over 90,000 cubic feet of documents,

some dating back to the 18th century.

All dedicated to preserving

the territory's history and culture.

So, Josh, this is everything they have on Clipper Endeavor.

-Wow. -And you can see it's considerable.

[Josh] Yeah.

So take me through the archives.

Take me through this accident.

I think a good place to start is with the experience

of the passengers who were on board.

[Josh] These files from the initial investigation contain evidence from

the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Coast Guard,

and PanAm itself, spanning a five-month inquiry in 1952.

They also contain the testimony of 17 survivors

who paint a picture of what happened on that fateful day.

So this is from a passenger named Juan Cruz Nieves.

Juan is 14 years old.

He's traveling for the first time by air with his friend.

Shortly after takeoff,

he hears what he thinks are explosions.

[Josh] Right. It says, "The first I knew there was something wrong

with the airplane was when I felt it shudder."

At 12:13 p.m., two minutes after takeoff,

the still ascending plane begins to shake.

But nobody in the cabin knows why.

So we have another passenger here, Nelda Rivera.

"The plane doesn't seem to be able

to gain sufficient altitude."

So these passengers know that something's wrong,

-but maybe not exactly what. -No.

Nelda goes on to say, "One of the crew came through the door

from the pilot's compartment and shouted something

in English that I did not understand.

And then sat down in his seat very quickly."

Most of the people on the plane, again, are from Puerto Rico,

and a lot of them don't speak English.

So even with the little information that they're getting,

they're not understanding.

[Josh] The plane, just out over open ocean,

is already turning back towards San Juan

when another loud noise shakes the cabin.

With minimal information and even less communication,

the passengers are unprepared for the emergency landing

that the pilots are about to attempt.

This is from another passenger, Emiliano Cruz Arroyo.

He says he was standing when the plane hit the water,

"Was thrown against the seat in front of mine.

And the next thing I remember

is that blood was coming from my nose and mouth.

Looked around for my friend,

but I was not able to find him."

So chaos when it hits the water.

Yeah, confusion everywhere.

[Josh] At 115 miles per hour,

the plane has dived into the Atlantic.

Miraculously, everyone on board has survived the landing.

But the disaster has only just begun.

The Clipper Endeavor is now rapidly sinking into the ocean.

So does the plane break apart when it hits the water?

Yeah, after the initial contact,

the tail hits first and separates.

The first officer didn't even know anything

until he looked out the window and saw it floating away.

-[Josh] Saw the tail floating away? -Yes.

And the plane then sinks? How fast?

Two, three minutes tops.

-Two, three minutes? -Yes.

-The entire plane's gone. -That's it.

So now I presume it's chaos.

Yes, nobody knows what to do.

-Right. -They don't know where to find their life jackets.

They don't know where the life rafts are.

They don't know where the exits are.

They're looking out there and realizing that, you know,

not only are they in the middle of this,

you know, roiling ocean, but it's...

They know it's full of sharks.

[Josh] Outside the plane, these tropical waters are teeming

with 42 species of sharks,

including known man-eaters like bulls and tigers.

15 knot winds are also kicking up 12 foot tall waves.

Some passengers are too scared to disembark.

And those life jackets,

they're tucked into the headrests

of the seats where most passengers

don't know to look for them.

This passenger, Gloria, says,

"The flight attendant opened the exit.

People began going out without their life jackets.

If there were instructions given about the life jackets,

I did not hear them."

I then grabbed my cousin by the arm and tried

to get her to leave the plane,

but she was hysterical and would not let go

of the side of the exit,

and I was not able to get her out."

[Russ] No.

[Josh] This is from, uh, Enrique Garcia.

" I went to the emergency exit behind me and went through it

with my baby, six months old.

I stayed on the wing for a moment,

but a big wave carried my baby away."

Yeah.

Ripped out of his arms.

[Russ] Out of his arms.

Come on.

How quickly do rescuers get on the scene?

The first aircraft is airborne within six minutes.

[Josh] It doesn't take long for responders to spot the passengers,

and rescue boats arrive on the scene within 90 minutes.

The rescuers who responded to the scene

could see sharks in the water.

So the Coast Guard Cutter that was sent to the rescue,

the Bramble,

they had the crew break out rifles

to fend off sharks.

In one instance, the co-pilot

of the first rescue plane to land

looks and sees Juan and his friend struggling,

and the co-pilot without even thinking about it

dives in after them.

And he talks about twice they were attacked by a shark,

and he had to kick it as hard as he could to drive it away.

Insane.

The human tragedy radiating from these pages

v overwhelming, and it didn't need to be this way.

The pilot got the plane down.

Life jackets were inches away

from these terrified and confused passengers.

But a lack of communication doomed their escape.

Can we also find information that can lead us

to where this happened?

We can, and within these files is something

that's going to show us where we think the plane is.

What's that?

A map showing the route of the plane,

including where they think it went down.

That indicates the crash location?

Yes.

Can we see that?

Well, I can show it to you here,

or we can go fly that path ourselves.

Let's do it.

[dramatic music playing]

All right.

Okay, you hear me?

I gotcha.

All right, let's rock and roll.

Hey, let's do it.

Josh, this is East La Grande Airport.

We are taking off in the same direction,

same runway as Clipper Endeavor.

So we are in their shadow right now.

We're following in their path.

[Josh] Explorer Russ Matthews and I are flying in the doomed path

of the PanAm Clipper Endeavor,

which crashed 70 years ago off of Puerto Rico,

drowning 52 passengers

and changing air safety procedures forever.

Now, a newly discovered map

from the original Civil Aeronautics Board investigation

may finally tell us where to find the wreck.

Okay, so show me this map.

What did you find in the archives?

This is it.

These are maps that were created

by crash investigators after the accident.

[Josh] Oh, my Lord.

Yes, and they detailed, step by step,

the sequence of events.

[Josh] This map provides a moment by moment account

of the plane's tragic nine-minute flight,

with key events numbered and described in the legend.

The document shows that the experience of the crew during the flight

was far different from that of the passengers.

[Russ] So if we look at this map here, they leave the airport.

We follow this line, and then we see a number one on here.

[Josh] Number one.

This is when the number three engine started to run hot

and the air pressure was failing.

[Josh] In response to the dropping pressure,

Captain John C. Byrne takes no chances.

He shuts down the failing engine,

leaving three more to keep the plane in the air.

We heard in the passenger testimony that something happens

outside the plane, a shudder, an explosion.

When that number three engine shut down,

that's probably the shudder that they felt.

Right.

Right. They could feel that this big,

powerful engine's going offline.

-Right. -Got it.

And the next thing we see on this map,

it looks like he's changing course.

[Russ] He's already decided he's going to return

to the airport that we just left from.

[Josh] Losing an engine at low altitude is dangerous,

but not necessarily fatal.

The pilots abort the flight path to New York, though,

and turn the plane around

to head back to San Juan Airport.

Okay, so Josh, right here, we're making the same turn

that they made on this map.

So this is not ideal, but he's got three good engines.

He's turning back to the airport.

Unfortunately, I see another marker on here,

-[Russ] Yeah. -number two.

[Russ] But now as he starts to come up on power

and he's trying to gain altitude,

he starts to lose the number four engine.

-Oh, no. -Yeah.

So now he's losing the other engine of the right wing.

Exactly.

[Josh] The number four engine has to be shut down

along with the number three,

rendering the entire right wing powerless.

The pilots are now desperately trying

to keep the plane aloft long enough

to return to the airport.

So he's trying to do anything he can to stay in the air.

But he's trying to use those engines

on the left wing to compensate for what he lost on the right.

[Russ] Yes. It's not working.

They're still losing altitude.

Now Captain Byrne has to figure out what to do.

It's starting to look likely that they're going to ditch.

-They're going to land in the water. -[Josh] Right.

The only option he has to prevent that

is he's got to make this plane lighter.

He's got to do anything he can to keep it in the air.

It is the only option to do that quickly.

[Josh] Number four on the list, fuel dumping.

[Russ] But it's very dangerous.

So he sends the second officer back to the cabin,

make sure nobody's smoking,

and to turn off electric power to the galley to the cabin.

[Josh] This is the one announcement shouted in English

that many of the passengers fail to understand.

What are they worried about? Like a spark?

They're worried about a spark.

They're worried about an explosion.

-Wow. -Yeah.

But one of the unfortunate results of that

is that it also turns off the public address system

in the cabin.

Oh, my word.

So now they have no ability

-to even communicate with the passenger. -Yeah, that's right.

There's no announcement made because they don't have

the ability to do this anymore.

Got it.

They've dumped 3,500 gallons of fuel

but are still miles away from the airport.

They're on a race against time now and they're losing.

[Josh] Right.

They're maybe 100 feet off.

100 feet above the last.

So this is like their Captain Sully

-miracle in the Hudson moment. -Exactly.

He's basically making the call in the instant,

"I'm not going to risk going back over land.

-I'm not going to make it. We're going in the water." -That's right.

-We realize that this is inevitable. -Right.

So at this point with the comm system off,

all the second officer can do is return to the cabin,

make a motion that they're about to ditch, take his seat.

Most of the people near him didn't understand English,

didn't understand what he was trying to tell them.

We read the testimony of these passengers and all of this,

this whole sequence of events,

they don't know really any of this is happening.

They just know something's wrong.

All they know is that that water is getting closer.

Right.

Number eight and the very last thing in this ledger is...

"Ditched."

Plane hits the water.

We've arrived at where the crew accounts

and the passenger testimony violently meet.

The Atlantic Ocean, where the plane lands on the water,

snapping off the tail section.

It could have been a miracle, but while some passengers

make it to life rafts and rescue, most do not.

The plane and tail sink beneath the 12 foot waves in minutes,

leaving few traces behind.

Okay, we should be over the position right now.

So Josh, take a look out there.

We are somewhere about where Clipper Endeavor went down.

[Josh] This is it.

The exact area where Russ believes the plane was lost.

The discovery of these documents has already given us

a major head start in locating the plane.

Starting with this and with the other information

we're finding in the archives.

Plus the technology we're bringing to bear,

this is going to give us the best chance to find Clipper Endeavor.

[Josh] Having shadowed the plane's final flight,

we land the chopper and prepare for a deep sea exploration

unlike any I've ever assisted.

Early the next morning at San Juan Harbor,

we prepare to board the Blue Manta,

a state of the art 77 foot long marine research

and surveying vessel that will serve as the nerve center

of our search.

We board the ship to meet the rest of our crew,

including an old friend of mine.

Hey guys, remember Evan Kovacs?

Oh my gosh, it's been forever. How are you?

[Josh] Yeah. Very good, man. Very good.

Last time I saw you, we were diving in Namibia.

Namibia, yeah, exactly.

[Josh] Evan Kovacs is an underwater imaging specialist

who I got to know scanning the depths

of Namibia's Lake Otjikoto.

And since then, he and sonar expert Ben Roberts here

have made some major upgrades to their kit.

The beasts.

This is our side scan sonar.

Big difference is we're towing this behind the boat

and most importantly we're getting it

really close to the bottom.

So we're going to have a much, much higher resolution image.

[Josh] The fact is, because of the depth of the wreck,

nobody has tried to find the Clipper Endeavor.

But going deep won't be an issue for us.

And so what depth is this rated to?

6,500 feet.

-This can go more than a mile underwater? -Over a mile.

-Okay, so that should get the job done. -[Evan] Yeah.

[Josh] The sonar will be hugging the ocean floor

where the average pressure is 900 pounds per square inch.

So once we get a target to investigate,

no one will be diving it

because no one can.

Instead, we'll be sending this remotely operated vehicle.

And on board here, we've got what?

[Evan] Well, we've got the 4K,

we've got the HD, we've got the sonar.

-So this has its own onboard sonar system. -It does, yeah.

[Josh] That means the ROV can not only chase a hit

from our main sonar,

it can initiate forward-facing sonar scans

ahead of itself

to home in on an exact target.

Okay, so we've got our sonar, we've got our ROV.

The big question is,

where do we send them? Where do we look exactly?

I've been working on that one for a while.

-Yeah? -Yeah.

You got a plan?

-Let's go check it out. -[Josh] Come on.

Inside, we pass by the array of computers

and monitors we'll be using to direct our search.

Also here is Russ's better half,

research analyst Idee Montijo.

-Idee. -Hey, Josh, how are you?

Great to see you.

And we've also got flag number 35.

[Josh] This is an official Explorers Club expedition,

so we're carrying an official flag.

And old 35 here, has quite the illustrious resume,

most recently as part of the expedition

that found Ernest Shackleton's ship,

the Endurance, on the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

Okay, well, we got a lot to live up to here.

Yeah, we do. We've got to add to that history.

-[Josh] Yes. -And here's how we're gonna do it.

All right, so we are here.

-[Josh] Mm-hmm. -[Russ] And then

this is the airfield

where Clipper Endeavor took off from.

-Got it. -So you remember the map we had

-with us in the helicopter? -Yes.

All right, so that's over here.

We can see that's the estimated flight path.

-[Josh] Right. -[Russ] All right, so you notice here

at the end of this estimated flight path,

they have a set of coordinates.

-That's where they figure the plane went down. -[Josh] Okay.

And that's roughly where on here?

It's roughly right here.

[Josh] Okay, got it. Now,

big question.

Is this an accurate set of coordinates?

-[Russ] So these are the best guesses... -[Josh] Okay.

...based on the eyewitness testimony,

-the survivors, and the rescuers. -[Josh] Got it.

Now, we did some digging,

and it took years, really...

-[Josh] Right. -...until we finally got the help

of the Coast Guard Historian's Office,

and they were able to produce this amazing document.

-It's been in the archives for the last 72 years. -Wow.

-[Russ] Yeah. -Okay, so what is this?

[Josh] Okay, so what am I looking at?

This is a comprehensive report

from the commander of the Greater Antilles Section.

So this is a Coast Guard report

that just was sitting in the archives in D.C.?

-Yeah. Yeah. -Wow.

Aboard the Blue Manta,

researcher Russ Matthews is showing me

a newly discovered Coast Guard document

that may help pinpoint

the location of the Clipper Endeavor.

The Pan Am plane whose crash in 1952

killed 52 people, resulting in

the air safety rules we still follow today.

So here on the second page,

we find that when the Coast Guard arrived on the scene,

it's about 80 minutes later.

Okay.

The new information from this Coast Guard report

has shown that the oil slick spotted by rescuers,

on which the original investigation based their coordinates,

had likely been drifting for over an hour since the crash.

So using weather data from 1952,

Russ has established a likely origin point for the slick.

Then there's a bearing taken during the crash

by the tower at San Juan Airport,

300 degrees, roughly seven miles offshore.

A statement from a witness says

he saw the Clipper further to the northwest.

And finally, Russ has the location of a reef

near the shore.

The captain said

he deliberately ditched the plane in deeper water

to avoid hitting it.

With all of these points,

Russ is creating a brand-new search zone

to find the Clipper Endeavor.

So, Idee,

how large an area are we talking about scanning here?

We're talking about

ten square nautical miles in total.

[Josh] Not only is this deeper water

than I've ever investigated,

but the search zone will take days and days at sea to cover.

Everyone aboard, though,

is enthusiastic to get underway.

All right, we got a plan. Should we go find a plane?

-Sounds good. -Let's go find a plane.

-Yeah. -Let's do it. Yeah.

[Josh] We've put out to sea where the Clipper Endeavor awaits.

Once we reach the search zone,

it's time to lower the side-scan sonar into the water.

But first, we need to put down something else.

Josh, this is our USBL transducer.

We're gonna put this in the water,

and then we have a beacon on the sonar fish

or the ROV

that will tell us where it is while we're underwater.

-Got it. So this thing's tracking that at all times? -Exactly.

[Josh] On a scan this deep, the transducer

is an essential piece of equipment.

It talks to both the sonar and the ROV

2,000 feet down in the dark.

Without it, we'd have no ability to pilot them safely.

And speaking of safety...

All right, so, not exactly flat calm out here.

[Evan] No, no. It's not ideal.

[Josh] Yeah. Can we sonar scan in this?

Yeah, it's at the edge. It's marginal.

But, you know, it's about a four to six foot sea,

so we're gonna go for it.

So how's this work? Obviously, this sonar unit's

attached to this big winch here.

-What do we got here? -Uh, exactly.

Yeah, so this winch has about

15,000, 16,000 feet on it.

And we're expecting to have anywhere up to 6,000 feet out.

Wow. So we're gonna have

a mile's worth of cable dragging behind us.

We potentially will in our deeper section.

Okay. Should we get it in the water?

-Yeah, let's go. -Let's do it.

Let's scan. Come on.

The Blue Manta is an aluminum twin-engine catamaran,

which means it can handle these seas.

We just need to make sure

that the sensitive sonar doesn't get smashed

as we winch it down into the rough water below.

[Evan] Okay, she's in!

[Josh] And once it's away, the search officially begins.

On our first shift, we fix our eyes to the monitor,

where we scan the first of ten lanes in our search zone.

All is calm.

Well, for a few minutes anyway.

Hmm. Wait, what is that?

Can we see that up close?

It's almost industrial.

[Josh] Right. Maybe an old container there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-[Russ] Yeah. -[Josh] I like that.

-[Russ] Mm-hmm. -How much water is this in?

This is in about 800 feet.

Okay.

-We're not scuba diving to that. -[Russ] No.

That's what we got the ROV for.

I think we should see what that is.

We mark the coordinates for us to return to later

with the ROV, and we continue the scan for hours.

It is about 11:34 p.m.

Still scanning.

Quick update.

It's 1:00 a.m.

Still scanning.

All right. So we're coming up on 2:00 a.m. here.

What's your sleep plan?

What's your strategy here, Russ?

I'm gonna power through.

You're not gonna sleep at all?

Probably not.

I mean, it took too much to get

into this position. I'm not...

-You're not leaving? -...wasting a second of it. No.

Well, I admire that.

And you're gonna film all night?

Mm-mm.

[mouthing] I'm going to bed.

Russ is an iron man,

but I've been on enough missions at sea

to know that rest is a valuable commodity.

So I make my way to my bunk...

All right, signing off.

...to be gently rocked to sleep by the sea.

I said gently.

Can we turn this thing down a little bit? Jeez.

All right.

It's a new day.

Gotta find some breakfast.

Pan Am economy passengers in 1952

got chilled pineapple juice, scrambled eggs

with grilled Canadian bacon,

muffins, and toast with honey and jam.

We do our best to match with burned coffee

and an off-brand frozen waffle.

A couple of not-Eggos later, and we get back to work.

We're scanning lane four of ten,

and the monitor is right where I left it a few hours ago.

The sea floor looks the same.

But after a while,

I'll admit I start to see things.

That's a dinosaur.

Right?

That's the head and the body and the legs.

-It's a little T-Rex face. -[Russ] Hmm.

[Josh] Needing a break, we hand off monitor duty,

and I decide to do a little fishing.

You have any jacks?

Go fish.

[Josh] After I lose, I get to return to an entire morning

and afternoon of staring at a screen

with no hard leads emerging.

Until just before sunset,

I grab some fresh air

and an unfortunate weather report.

Conditions don't look great.

I mean, wind is picking up,

-forecast is for rougher seas tonight, yes? -[Russ] Yes.

Weather's looking like it's gonna turn on us.

-[Josh] Yeah. -Um, higher seas,

maybe some rain.

Higher seas meaning what?

Uh, ten feet.

-Ten-foot seas? -[Russ] Yeah.

[scoffs] Okay, that'll be a fun night.

It's gonna get rough. We're gonna get beat up a bit.

All right. Well, fasten your seat belts.

It's gonna be a bumpy night.

So far on our trip, the sea has been bumpy but manageable.

On night number two, though,

Mother Nature has decided to crank up the dial.

Getting bad out.

[Josh] Somewhere in the waters off Puerto Rico

is the wreckage of the Clipper Endeavor.

And while scanning 2,000 feet

beneath the surface of the Atlantic is never easy,

a raging storm is making tonight's work especially difficult.

Oh, my God. Flying fish!

The fish just jumped into the boat.

Unbelievable.

Hopefully, that's not the only catch of the day.

We toss it back and brace for even worse seas,

and they don't disappoint.

Waves crash over the bow of our research vessel.

Half the crew is throwing up off camera somewhere,

and those who aren't are immobilized by nausea

and soaked to the bone.

Yet this experience is another sobering reminder

that Clipper Endeavor's survivors clutched

to a life raft in waves even larger than these

while waiting for rescue.

After suffering Poseidon's wrath

for nearly five hours,

the seas finally abate and the world stops spinning.

All right, time to get back into the mix.

I head below deck and return to scanning.

Oh. What is that?

That's not nothing.

-What is that? -Can we go closer on that?

[Josh] How long is just the bottom piece?

[Ben] About 50 feet.

Width?

About 20 feet.

It's in the pocket for the fuselage.

This target is long enough and wide enough

to be a DC-4 fuselage,

and is casting a sonar shadow

that suggests it rises from the ocean floor.

We mark it to come back later with the ROV

and spend the remainder of the night

scanning through the search zone.

On the third day, we enter the final lanes of scanning.

It starts out like the previous lanes.

It doesn't end like them.

Oh.

What is that?

That looks like it could be the tail of an airplane.

What's the size of that?

It's about 35 feet long,

broken into a couple pieces.

Tail's how high?

27 feet.

[Josh] How long is just the larger piece?

Uh, 7 meters, about 25 feet.

Tail?

I mean, it's the one piece that we know for sure

separated from the airplane.

-It should be sitting by itself. -[Russ] Yeah.

Only one way to know for sure.

I would love to dive on this.

-Let's see what it is. -[Russ] Okay.

[Josh] This is our best hit thus far,

and we immediately add it to our list

to follow up with the ROV.

When we finally complete the search zone a few hours later,

we have four solid targets to investigate,

including one that resembled the fuselage

and another the tail.

I go on deck to welcome the towfish back aboard.

Okay. Sonar unit is coming up. We're gonna

switch the winch over to the ROV,

get that in the water, get it down.

Check out these targets.

It takes hours to raise and stow the sonar.

Then we transfer the cable to the ROV

to dive our first target as the sun sets.

Once we verify the data connection,

we pair it to our transducer

so that we can track its movements to the inch

as it descends to the bottom of the Atlantic.

The ROV is released into the water

and begins the long, dark descent

to the possible tail section we discovered in lane ten.

ROV is diving?

Yeah, we are heading down.

Passing 100 feet.

[Josh] Okay, going down.

The descent is slow and careful.

Everything below us is an unknown.

All right, passing 600.

Okay, almost there. Here we go.

The bottom should be coming into view pretty soon here.

[Evan] Yeah, we should be coming in any minute now.

[Josh] Here we go. Okay. We are on the bottom.

Wow, look at that.

[Evan] All right, well, let's head to the target.

-The visibility is not great. -[Evan] Nope.

Dark and sandy.

And what's stamped on that tail livery?

Uh, it's got the PAA logo...

-Right. -...and the registration number.

[Josh] Right.

[Russ] N88899.

-Seared into your memory. -Yes.

It's a little tough with the topography, too.

It's like these little hills and stuff in front of you.

Yeah, it's just... They're big sand waves.

[Josh] It seems totally flat when you're looking at it on that screen going by,

but you realize there's a lot of actual...

There's a lot of texture down here, a lot of topography.

The sonar from our towfish found the target.

Now we're relying on the ROV's sonar to bring us to it.

Ooh, sonar. Is that something?

Yeah, no, no, no. We got something coming up on the sonar here.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Something there.

What is that?

In 1978, the Pina Colada was declared

the official drink of Puerto Rico.

But bragging rights for the original recipe

have caused many a bar fight.

Legend holds that a Puerto Rican pirate

invented the cocktail to help improve crew morale,

but that the recipe was lost.

That is, until 1954,

when the Caribe Hilton's Ramon "Chito" Marrero

mixed together rum, pineapple juice,

and cream of coconut,

creating the Pina Colada.

Or so they say.

Perfection.

A short time later, the Barrachina restaurant

claimed a recipe of their own to be the original,

and now serves 3,500 of them a day.

Let's make that 3,501.

Oh, that's amazing.

-I know. -[Josh] Which is better?

The investigation is ongoing.

I should probably have about 40 more of these to figure it out.

Keep them coming, Jorge.

No problem.

[mouthing] It's this one.

All right. Yeah, we got something right here.

-Uh... -Oh, something there.

What is that?

Is that sand?

[Evan] I thought it was something solid,

but it could be a clay bank.

Yeah. Yeah, it is.

-Arms going right through. That's just clay. -[Evan] Yep.

I mean, a big, flat surface there

reflecting off the sonar.

-Totally. -[Evan] Yeah.

-tail fin. -Like a tail fin.

-Right. -Yeah.

But it's weird. There's nothing in...

-I mean, it's just clay. -[Josh] Yeah.

Heartbreaker.

The topography has fooled us

into reading a natural sand formation

as potentially man-made.

So, strike one.

Intriguing target. Not Clipper Endeavor.

No. No.

There's still more out there.

Let's get some shut-eye and we'll try again tomorrow.

Absolutely.

All right, Evan, I think we're gonna bring her up.

Copy that. Bringing her up.

[Josh] After hauling up the ROV,

we head to our bunks for a few hours of sleep

as the boat steams back to our second sonar target.

I awake the next morning as the team prepares

to redeploy the ROV.

And the day starts off with a bang.

Or should I say, a snap.

[indistinct chatter]

-[man 1] Whoa. Up and over. -[man 2] Where are we going with that?

[man 1] Up and over.

[man 2] Up and over. All right.

[Josh] Something wrong out there.

They got a problem out there.

-Whoa! What happened? -[Evan] Yeah.

Whole tracking pole let go.

It broke off?

The bracket sheared right there at the attachment.

[Josh] I'm, uh...

I'm afraid to ask. What does this mean?

Uh, we don't know... [sighs]

Yeah. Wow. Uh...

This is basically

the transducer for the underwater GPS.

-Right. -[Evan] So,

first and foremost, we've lost all underwater positioning,

which then means we can't use the ROV.

Basically, diving the ROV without this is

stumbling around in a dark room

with a flashlight,

but the room's the size of Manhattan.

-We're done? -We're done. Yeah.

[Josh] This is devastating.

After almost a week of scanning

and searching with the ROV,

we're unable to continue the investigation

or probe any remaining targets.

All right, well, let's regroup and get this thing secured

-to figure out where we go from here. -[Evan] Yep.

[Josh] Russ and Idee

have spent years using every available piece of evidence

to home in on this search zone.

And while several targets remain,

I'm not sure any of them feel diagnostic enough

to be something as large as the Clipper.

If you were a betting man,

where would you put it down?

-I was betting it's in here. -Right.

-Yeah. -Do you think maybe it still is?

It's a mystery, Josh.

[Josh] It is a real mystery

because having been a part of many searches for lost planes,

this one feels really findable.

-Yeah. -[Josh] It just

feels like there's so much data.

You've created, I think, such a sensible bounding box here.

-It just feels like it should be in here. -Right.

All these voices from 72 years ago

are just reaching out and saying

-this is where it is. -[Russ] Yeah.

-They want to be found. -Big time.

[Russ] We're not giving up. We'll be back.

[Josh] If I've learned one thing studying history,

it's that tragedy always leaves a legacy.

There's loss and there's pain.

Those are unavoidable.

But in the case of the Clipper Endeavor,

there's also growth.

After the accident, the Clipper's captain

recommended a pre-flight safety briefing

to avert panic and confusion.

Pan Am wisely heeded his advice,

followed by the rest of the aviation industry.

And you know what happened?

It worked.

Four years later, Pan Am Flight 6

ditched in the Pacific Ocean.

Its captain not only did a safety briefing

but he and his crew spoke with passengers

throughout the ordeal to set them at ease.

And everyone escaped with their lives.

So did countless others in the 70 years that followed.

We are demonstrably safer as passengers today

because of the Clipper Endeavor.

Yet this was not a sacrifice willingly made.

That's why Russ, Idee, and the team

will keep searching.

Using this mission to learn, to adapt,

and to refine the search grid for the next mission,

until the plane is found.

So that those who gave their lives

can receive the full measure of gratitude

that they so richly deserve.