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

1457 points by KewpieCutie97 23 hours ago on reddit | 39 comments

Illlogik1 | 23 hours ago

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

cwthree | 23 hours ago

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

cctchristensen | 23 hours ago

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...

yoweigh | 22 hours ago

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.

boytekka | 14 hours ago

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

hostes_victi | 23 hours ago

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

MH370 will probably never be found

Luster-Purge | 22 hours ago

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

areyoualocal | 20 hours ago

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.

ReadItOrNah | 19 hours ago

I think the water is also a significant factor here

areyoualocal | 19 hours ago

That's also why its dark.

SillyFlyGuy | 16 hours ago

Water? At the bottom of the ocean? Preposterous!

ReadItOrNah | 16 hours ago

Both the bottom and the top

ilikepants712 | 11 hours ago

The middle is right out

lo_fi_ho | 15 hours ago

Well tax water 100% until it leaves the ocen!

Fenixri3es | 10 hours ago

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

Mackey_Corp | 20 hours ago

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…

bugman573 | 19 hours ago

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.

Mackey_Corp | 17 hours ago

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.

RedEyeView | 23 hours ago

They've found a few bits of it.

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

dragdritt | 22 hours ago

Never is a terribly long time

Codeviper828 | 19 hours ago

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

The actual sinking greatly throws off the location

bhamnz | 13 hours ago

This is an excellent point

Codeviper828 | 4 hours ago

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

zap_p25 | 19 hours ago

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.

Martiantripod | 9 hours ago

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

dittybopper_05H | 8 hours ago

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

therealduckie | 15 hours ago

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

DiogenicSearch | 2 hours ago

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.

thetactlessknife | an hour ago

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