The debris were found on ocean floor 74 years after crash that killed 52Searchers have found the wreckage from a Pan Am flight that plunged into the ocean off Puerto Rico in 1952, an accident that killed 52 and led to requirements for the passenger safety briefings given on every commercial flight.The plane, the Clipper Endeavour, made a hard landing after losing engine power shortly after take off. The 17 passengers and crew who survived told investigators everyone lived through the landing, but panic set in as many passengers struggled to find life vests and the crew had a hard time pulling out life rafts.Within minutes, the plane sank. Explorers found the wreckage of the DC-4 last month by using an autonomous sonar drone to locate the fuselage and tail in 2,000 feet of water. Now before take off, flight attendants instruct passengers about exit locations and where life vests are located and how to inflate them."This one became a catalyst, and it helped drive safety steps forward of better flotation equipment and the pre-flight briefings," said aviation safety expert John Cox, a pilot and founder of Safety Operating Systems.This crash first caught the attention of Russ Matthews in 2019 when he saw a blurb about a luggage tag from the flight washing ashore in Florida. He said the historical significance of the Clipper Endeavour prompted him to dig deeper. That led to years of digging through the Pan Am Airlines and Coast Guard archives looking for clues about the location of the plane's watery grave. But the key to finding the wreckage was found in records in Puerto Rico from a hearing that was held on the crash, and a map estimating the location of the crash.Bad weather disrupted a previous attempt to locate the wreck in 2024. But Matthews said he and the volunteers who work with his Air/Sea Heritage Foundation dreamt of making a second attempt to find it before next year's 75th anniversary of the crash.All the research Matthews' group had done, combined with weather data from the time of the crash, was synthesised to create a map of the most likely location and a search area of 10 square nautical miles. The drone found the wreckage on its first pass over that area, although the explorers didn't know that until it returned to the surface with its images.