By Ray Sanchez, CNN
(CNN) — After New York-bound Pan Am Flight 526A, nicknamed the Easter Special, plunged into the sea off Puerto Rico 74 years ago, a doctor on a rescue boat snatched up a purse floating in the choppy waters.
Inside was a powder puff and handwritten letter – soaked but still legible – from a young Puerto Rican soldier stationed in Massachusetts to his new wife in the southern coastal city of Ponce, Dr. Angel M. Marchand wrote in El Mundo, the island’s leading newspaper at the time.
“You cannot imagine the joy you have given me by saying you will join me in New York. I am the happiest man on Earth,” the soldier wrote, adding that he prayed to the Virgin Mary to protect her on the journey. “Do not be afraid of the plane. Nothing will happen.”
The doctor later spotted the bride’s name, Gloria Rosario, at the second hospital he visited looking for her. There she was on a list of the 17 survivors.
“Miss, I found your purse with a letter from your husband. He must be very worried. When I saw your name in the hospital, I decided to let him know you were safe and sound.”
“Oh, poor man,” she responded. “He is so good. And he has faith.”
When the doctor asked about the accident, Rosario said, “More people should have been saved.”
In all, the crash claimed 52 lives. Because most of those lives might have been saved, the crash prompted the now-familiar though often-ignored preflight safety briefings for passengers on where to find and how to use life vests, rafts and emergency exits.
Rosario’s 19-year-old cousin, who was seated next to her, was among those who did not make it. Her cousin cried hysterically, too frightened by the heavy swells to jump into the ocean moments after the crash landing. She perished minutes later, still clinging to the plane, Rosario told crash investigators and members of her family.
The wreckage was lost in the Atlantic until last month, when an aviation search team discovered the largely forgotten Pan Am “Clipper Endeavor” 2,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface, just miles off the island’s northern coast.
“My mother always lamented the plane went down in the deepest part of the ocean,” Rosario’s son, Adrian, 54, told CNN. Just 22 at the time of the crash, Rosario died in 2015 at the age of 85.
“She always imagined it would take a long time to find the wreckage. I would have loved for her to have seen this. She always wanted recognition for the victims, especially her cousin.”
The passengers and crew included John Burn, the Pan Am captain, who survived his second deadly plane crash; a missionary couple who died while their 2-year-old son, Mark, was found floating in the water; Novetah Davenport, a pioneer aviator who helped rescue the boy; a 45-year-old father from Brooklyn who had traveled to San Juan to be reunited with his wife and their six children after a two-year separation.
The Douglas DC-4 aircraft took off just after noon on a Good Friday with 64 passengers and five crew members. But Burn was forced to ditch the plane nine minutes later in rough, shark-infested waters northwest of San Juan on April 11, 1952. Two of its four engines had failed.
All passengers survived the initial impact – with the plane’s tail section breaking off – but only 17 were rescued. The others perished in the final moments of chaos and confusion on the quickly sinking aircraft, according to the crash investigation and press reports at the time.
Burn’s son, Gray, a 58-year-old private pilot, said his late father would speak emotionally about what became known on the island as the Good Friday tragedy, particularly the helplessness felt during an emergency that took so many lives.
“He felt the weight of being the person in charge of the entire flight,” Gray Burn told CNN.
“I think what got him the most was that a lot of the people flying were afraid of the water, even though a lot of them lived there in Puerto Rico, right on the water. When they went down, water started coming in fast.”
‘Look out the window and enjoy the scenery’
Gloria married Hipolito Rosario in Ponce on December 23, 1951, according to family members. They were childhood sweethearts: She was 9 and he was 11 when they first met.
Nearly four months later, Rosario, joined by her 19-year-old cousin, Norma Rodriguez, boarded the plane. Rosario was going to the US to live with her husband. Her cousin – at the last minute – decided to accompany her, with plans to work as a seamstress. It was the first flight for both young women.
The cousins were part of the largest wave of Puerto Ricans to the US, known as the “Great Migration,” in the decade after 1950, when an estimated 470,000 people left the island for the mainland.
The majority settled in New York, coping with the pain of life in a new city, where they struggled to find jobs and fought discrimination, language barriers and institutional neglect, including schools not equipped to serve them. Many joined the military or sought jobs in the garment and manufacturing industries.
Rosario told crash investigators she sat in the window seat next to an emergency exit over the wing on the left side of the aircraft. She said on takeoff, the plane “seemed to be going very slow and did not gain altitude quickly,” according to her survivor statement. The aircraft weaved from side to side.
“My cousin was quite apprehensive, and I told her to look out the window and enjoy the scenery and not to worry,” Rosario said. She then heard “two loud noises” before the plane veered left and began to descend over the ocean.
‘The plane hit the water very hard’
At 12:13 p.m., at Burn’s request, the flight advised the San Juan control tower they were returning to the airport, according to a report by the Civil Aeronautics Board, a predecessor of the Federal Aviation Administration.
“Roger 526A, cleared to land, Runway 9,” the tower replied as the oil pressure of one engine dropped rapidly and the other engine backfired several times.
At 12:17 p.m., the tower asked the flight for its location.
“We are still quite a way out.”
A minute later, the tower alerted the US Coast Guard in San Juan. At 12:19 p.m., Burn asked the second officer to alert passengers the plane was about to ditch. Moments later, the plane crash-landed in the ocean.
“The plane hit the water very hard, and I was thrown forward roughly,” Rosario told investigators, adding that water started pouring into the cabin. She removed her seat belt as the steward opened an emergency exit door and “people began going out without their life jackets.”
She told investigators she asked the steward for the location of the life jackets and he responded, “in the pocket” of the seat. She could not find them.
“The passengers were not told where the jackets were located or instructed in their use by any crew member prior to ditching. As a result, considerable confusion occurred,” the investigation report states.
Rosario said she grabbed her cousin’s arm and tried to get her out of the plane.
“She was hysterical and would not let go of the side of the exit,” said Rosario, who said she jumped off the wing when the water was chest-high. She was helped by the steward and another crew member in the water. She recalled the pilot reaching for her before she found herself on a raft.
Captain’s second deadly crash in nine years
Burn had defied the odds before.
At the time of the San Juan accident, he was married to singer Jane Froman, whom he saved while badly injured and floating on a makeshift raft after a USO seaplane he was piloting crashed in a river in Portugal in 1943, according to his son and press reports at the time. That crash killed 24 passengers.
Burn later told investigators he helped two “panicky” women with children put on life jackets and directed passengers to abandon the plane, according to a May 1952 account of his testimony in The New York Times. But some passengers remained fastened to their seats.
Burn, a 36-year Pan Am veteran, helped a passenger open the main cabin door and “began forcibly evacuating passengers through that exit” before the pilot was thrown into the water, according to the crash report.
“Of the 12 passengers who survived, seven evacuated the aircraft through emergency cabin exits, four through the main cabin door, and one through the right cockpit window,” the report said. The first and second officers, on the only life raft launched, picked up five passengers as well as the flight purser and steward. A rescue aircraft picked up the captain and seven other passengers who floated in the rough waters from 30 minutes to an hour.
Burn’s son, Gray, recalled the captain saying, “‘I can only throw so many people out under these conditions.’ I guess that’s what really bothered him about it.”
“With no safety briefing provided, a significant language barrier, and no coordinated evacuation procedure in place, passengers faced chaos, confusion, and heavy seas as the aircraft flooded and sank in less than three minutes,” said a statement from the Air/Sea Heritage Foundation.
The exploration team, which included the Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown” show, found the wreckage in June using an autonomous underwater drone.
A toddler is saved as he reaches out from the water
Another survivor was Novetah Davenport, an aviation pioneer and member of The Ninety-Nines international organization of women pilots.
Margarita Montalvo recalled taking Davenport to the airport that Good Friday morning with the aviator’s brother, her adoptive grandfather, according to a 2022 article in El Adoquin, a digital publication dedicated to Puerto Rican culture.
Montalvo and her grandfather returned to the airport after hearing about the crash.
As Good Friday processions took place around the island, people lined the shore near San Juan harbor and cheered an amphibious Coast Guard aircraft that rescued all but one of the survivors.
They saw Davenport emerge from a rescue aircraft clutching the hand of a toddler. Davenport told them she escaped the plane and pulled the young boy to safety as he reached out from the water, according to published reports and Montalvo’s account. Davenport remained in touch with the boy until her death in 1992 at the age of 90, Montalvo wrote.
The boy’s name is Mark Van Daalen. He was 2 years old when the plane went down, the son of missionaries Leo and Eunice Van Daalen, according to published reports and The Watchtower, the official publication of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The family was planning to visit relatives on the mainland.
“Leo and Eunice” died in the crash, according to The Watchtower. Their son “was found floating in the ocean. He was tossed into a life raft by a survivor and was given artificial respiration – and he lived.”
Soon after the crash, famed Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez wrote a song titled “The Good Friday Tragedy,” which for decades has been played by radio stations across the island the day before Easter.
“What a sorrowful Good Friday. The anguish and pain suffered by our brothers flying to New York.”
The lyrics also mention a “valiant woman” wrapping her arms around a crying boy and saving him as she struggled against heavy swells.
‘Lost years that can never be recovered’
Diana Lachatanere said she was 5 years old at the time of the crash. Her Cuban-born father, Romulo Lachatanere, a pharmacist and journalist in the Spanish-language press, did not survive.
Lachatanere, 80, a former archivist and assistant director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, said she learned about the discovery of the wreckage last week.
“One of the things that I wonder was, what if he was knocked out from the landing?” she said.
Discovery Channel will report on the finding in an “Expedition Unknown” episode later this year. Discovery Channel, like CNN, is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
There are no plans to recover the wreckage or disturb it in any way, a spokesperson for “Expedition Unknown” told CNN, noting the site is a grave for those who died in the crash.
The Air/Sea Heritage Foundation is working with the government of Puerto Rico to expand protections for the wreckage site and advocating for a memorial honoring those lost in the crash.
“To be frank, this discovery changes nothing for me,” Diana Lachatanere told CNN. “My father has still been dead 74 years. Maybe if a body was recovered… I just don’t know. Actually, a body isn’t the point, it’s the lost years that can never be recovered.”
But the tragedy’s contributions to flight safety provided some solace, Lachatanere said.
“I’ve been flying since I was 15 – 1961. I used to pay attention and then it became white noise,” she said of the preflight briefings. “I shall now pay attention and give the stewardesses their due.”
Rosario’s son and daughter recalled how she seemed to find purpose from the crash. She was a social worker for more than three decades and obtained a master’s degree in New York at the age of 42. Rosario and her husband of 62 years raised four children in Brooklyn.
Rosario took a flight to New York soon after the accident. She continued flying for decades, said her 63-year-old daughter, Frances Viruet.
After every flight, Viruet said, Rosario always stopped outside the cockpit to shake the pilot’s hand and say, “Thank you.”
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