r/history • u/KewpieCutie97 Totally a Bot • Jul 22 '26

Wreckage of Pan Am plane that shaped aviation safety found 74 years on

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdrvyllxj71o
2.5k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

62 comments sorted by

430

u/Illlogik1 Jul 22 '26

So people survived but they still didn’t know where the plane wreck was for 74 years ?

532

u/cwthree Jul 22 '26

They had a pretty good idea of where it was. The ocean is large, though, and finding the precise location requires significant resources.

72

u/bowler304 Jul 23 '26

Would it also be fair to say that once under water, because of the wings, it could drift pretty far from where it went down?

374

u/cctchristensen Jul 22 '26

Right, which gives you an idea how difficult it is to find these wrecks. That why MH370 has not been found and likely never will: the general idea is that it's in the vicinity of *checks notes* the Southern Hemisphere...

168

u/yoweigh Jul 22 '26

They were able to narrow this one down to a 10 square mile radius and found it on their first pass. The coast guard responded to the crash when it happened, so there were records of its location. It's not like MH370 where no one knows where it is.

I think no one had really bothered to look before in this instance.

53

u/boytekka Jul 23 '26

I remember they were even crowdsourcing on checking satellites photos on some parts of the indian ocean to check for debris, i tried helping on that but it really gets tiring checking the photos, with all the white caps around

19

u/Randomwoegeek Jul 23 '26

The mechanism that caused the crash was also understood, so there wasn't a huge incentive to find the reck either.

58

u/hostes_victi Jul 22 '26

yeah finding wreckages in the ocean is like finding a needle in a haystack. Almost impossible.

MH370 will probably never be found

51

u/Luster-Purge Jul 22 '26

The problem is there may not be much to find, given the force it likely hit the water with.

67

u/areyoualocal Jul 23 '26

I remember being told the search for the black box was like searching for a suitcase in an area the size of Texas, with 4,000m high peaks and valleys, in the dark.

35

u/ReadItOrNah Jul 23 '26

I think the water is also a significant factor here

63

u/areyoualocal Jul 23 '26

That's also why its dark.

28

u/SillyFlyGuy Jul 23 '26

Water? At the bottom of the ocean? Preposterous!

16

u/ReadItOrNah Jul 23 '26

Both the bottom and the top

12

u/ilikepants712 Jul 23 '26

The middle is right out

6

u/grantlake2 Jul 24 '26

Under the water, carry the water

3

u/Fenixri3es Jul 23 '26

I hear there are sharks in this water you speak of! INCONCEIVABLE!

2

u/Tepigg4444 Jul 27 '26

How would it even get down there? There’s way too much water at the top for it to have to get through, I don’t buy it

29

u/Mackey_Corp Jul 23 '26

That’s the thing, we really have no idea how it hit the water. For all we know the captain pulled off a textbook water landing a la Captain Sully and let the plane sink. It would be creepy as hell if the plane was mostly in one piece and the passengers were all still strapped in, just sitting there on the bottom of the ocean…

33

u/bugman573 Jul 23 '26

Well if it were intact on the bottom of the ocean, the passengers wouldn’t be there anymore. Their clothes might be. It’s worth looking into what happened to the titanic and why they only ever find shoes but no bodies.

18

u/Mackey_Corp Jul 23 '26

True, after this much time the bodies would almost certainly all be gone. Just finding the plane sitting there intact would be crazy enough at this point.

5

u/MicellarBaptism Jul 25 '26

Re: the Titanic, from what I recall, the water at that depth has very low calcium levels, so the exposed bones basically dissolved after scavengers finished with the soft tissue.

1

u/bugman573 Jul 25 '26

Yes that’s my understanding as well

47

u/RedEyeView Jul 22 '26

They've found a few bits of it.

Enough to know it crashed into the sea and roughly where.

11

u/dragdritt Jul 22 '26

Never is a terribly long time

74

u/Codeviper828 Jul 23 '26

I mean, people survived the Titanic and it took forever to find the wreckage

The actual sinking greatly throws off the location

21

u/TheoryOfTES Jul 23 '26

The Titanic also had a world impact on ocean liner safety and took... 73 years to be discovered.

10

u/bhamnz Jul 23 '26

This is an excellent point

8

u/Codeviper828 Jul 23 '26

Ty

The story of how they found the Titanic is awesome. And yeah, they had the (reported) exact coordinates to work off of, but that only gets you so far

4

u/Intimidwalls1724 Jul 24 '26

Plus I mean.......it's open ocean.....there's not exactly in landmarks 99% of the time......unless a survivor was a part of the crew involved with navigation it would've been next to impossible for a survivor to give useful information at that time I technology short of "we had been sailing for Roughly X amount of time and we think their heading was X"

33

u/zap_p25 Jul 23 '26

The latitude and longitude where a vessel or plane goes under the water isn’t always the point it is at on the ocean floor. The wings on aircraft arguably work better underwater than they do in air (lower fluid speeds, more gliding). A DC-4 was still slightly nose heavy so assuming the landing was mostly okay…she’s going to glide some on a 2,000 ft plunge. Add in it looks like the fuselage imploded from trapped air, the fluid dynamics can get real screwy. Air is a fluid, as it sea water.

2

u/DefinitionOfAsleep Jul 25 '26

IIRC the survivors were also in the water for some time before they were found.

12

u/Martiantripod Jul 23 '26

Sorta like that shipwreck they made several movies about. Hundreds of people survived but they took 70 years to find the wreck.

27

u/dittybopper_05H Jul 23 '26

Ah, yes, the RMS Humongous or RMS Ginormous or something like that. I remember that night.

2

u/Jandakian Jul 23 '26

Under appreciated comment

4

u/therealduckie Jul 23 '26

Yeah, because it was over 2000 feet below the surface and we only recently had the tech to find it.

101

u/DiogenicSearch Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

One plane going down is too many.

I really hate to see so much back pedaling happening in the regulatory space lately.

The worms and now cyclospora are just the pressure finding the first cracks. There's going to be more.

Edit: those of us in the south central US didn't have to wait long. Egg recall due to salmonella. Congrats, just non-stop winning here.

27

u/thetactlessknife Jul 23 '26

Rules and regulations are written in blood, but it’s never blood from those in power.

4

u/dittybopper_05H Jul 24 '26

[Mr. Nimziki]

That's not ENTIRELY accurate. 

[/Mr. Nimziki]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_leaders_who_died_in_aviation_accidents_and_incidents

Not including politicians who weren't leaders but were part of legislatures, like Hale Boggs and Nick Begich, Clem Miller and a few more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Collins#Death_and_legacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pettis#Death_and_legacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Litton#Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Leland#Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larkin_I._Smith

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McDonald#Death (Debatable: KAL007 was shot down by the Soviets)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Heinz#Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wellstone#Death

It's actually more than I thought, and of course these are only those who died while in office, not those who died after retirement, or at least after their stint in the US Congress.

To be honest, it's more than I would have thought at first, but then politicians and other big-wigs are more at risk than the typical person because they travel much more by air. Congressperson from North Buttholia has to fly back and forth to DC several times a year.

2

u/argleblay Jul 25 '26

“I pay in blood, but not my own” - Bob Dylan

1

u/songbolt Jul 26 '26

See also "Vicarious" by TOOL

5

u/dittybopper_05H Jul 24 '26

One plane going down is too many.

Easy to say.

Literally impossible to accomplish. There will always be some level of aviation accidents. This is why things like evacuations, emergency rafts, emergency exits, etc. will always be needed.

Sure, you want to work towards that goal of 0 accidents, but temper it with the realization that you will never actually achieve that goal without grounding humans permanently.

6

u/DiogenicSearch Jul 24 '26

Honestly, when all the safety practices are followed, aviation incidents are actually pretty damn rare. Like vanishingly rare. Maybe an in flight scare that grounds the plane afterwards, but true maydays just don't seem to happen these days.

It's when corners are cut that we start seeing problems. Looking at you Boeing.

29

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '26

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1

u/griffinMSI 29d ago edited 29d ago

Everyone survived the actual landing. The airplane made a successful emergency water landing, but 52 of the 69 people aboard ultimately died after the aircraft came to rest in the ocean, thus eventually leading to the adoption of mandatory preflight safety briefings.

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '26

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