On This Day: 582 Dead as 747s Collide on Tenerife Runway

Blinded by fog, a KLM Boeing 747 attempting a take-off slammed into a Pan Am jumbo jet that had taken a wrong turn onto the same runway. Human error can partly be blamed for what is still considered the deadliest airplane accident in history.

A Time magazine article examined the crash. After explaining the Canary Island’s wonderful mild climate, called “perpetual spring” by travelers, Time went on to say, “Last week Tenerife was about as hellish as any place on earth can get.”

The article cites a number of haunting “if’s” that might have prevented the accident: “If the planes were not diverted because of a terrorist bombing, if the KLM plane were not as heavy as it was after refueling,” concluding “but for the tragic victims of Tenerife, there were no ‘ifs.’”

Neither of the planes should even have been on Tenerife.

Both were originally scheduled to land at Las Palmas, the Canary Islands capital, but separatists had set off a bomb at the airport there.

The KLM plane, coming from Amsterdam, and the Pan Am jet, flying from Los Angeles through New York, were both temporarily diverted to Tenerife, the largest island in the Canaries, off the northwest coast of Africa.

In dense fog, the KLM jet had just refueled and was heading for take-off, when the taxiing Pan Am jet missed a turnoff and ended up on the same runway.

There were communication problems between the air traffic controllers and the KLM crew. The KLM plane reportedly did not receive final clearance to take off.

Salon offers pilot Patrick Smith’s perspective on history’s most deadly aviation disaster at Tenerife. According to Smith, “The magnitude of the catastrophe speaks for itself, but what makes it particularly unforgettable is the startling set of ironies and coincidences that preceded it.”

The crash claimed the lives of 582 people, but, out of the 396 passengers on the Pan Am jet, 61 managed to survive.

Since 1977, technological developments have improved aircraft safety.

“Most large airports nowadays are equipped with ground tracking radar, and several have installed innovative lighting systems designed to keep crews from inadvertently crossing active runways or taxiways,” writes pilot Patrick Smith.

Another incident that sparked airline reform occurred on Jan. 13, 1982. An Air Florida jetliner took off from Washington National Airport under snowy conditions and crashed into the city’s 14th Street bridge soon after ascending into the air. Seventy-eight people died in the disaster.

“God, look at that thing,” copilot Roger Alan Pettit told the plane’s captain, Larry Wheaton, during takeoff, referring to either the flight instruments or the throttle position. “That doesn’t seem right, does it?” The pilot chose to ignore Pettit’s concerns and the results were tragic, according to a January 2007 article in The Washington Post.

According to AirDisaster.com, “By failing to activate the engine anti-ice, the large amounts of snow and ice that were sucked into the engines during reverse thrust use was allowed to remain there, unchallenged.”

The Air Florida crash was not only blamed on the failure to properly de-ice the plane, but on the inability of the pilots to act on the problem.

The deadly crash placed the “cowboy culture” of the aviation industry under the microscope. At the time, pilots “did not need advice, and copilots and other crew members often were afraid to assert themselves,” the Post wrote. But after the crash, the culture began to change as pilots were taught to communicate better with one another and learn a system called Crew Resource Management.

The need for better communication and checklists also spread to hospitals and businesses.

History of Pan Am

The Pan Am Historical Foundation traces the history of the now defunct airline. Pan American World Airways was launched in 1927 with single engine aircraft that flew between Key West, Florida and Havana, Cuba. The airline folded in 1991 due to financial difficulties. “From this beginning, came the airline that would literally open the world to aviation. Pan Am launched more new aircraft development than any other airline in history,” according to the Pan Am Historical Foundation.

History's Worst Plane Crashes

BootsnAll Travel describes the “Ten Worst Airplane Crashes in History.” The author, a pilot, notes that crew error was only the culprit in three of the ten catastrophes. He details a variety of deadly air mishaps, including a crash near Mount Fuji in Japan and a mid-air collision in Kazakhstan. He excludes the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, considering them to belong to a different scale of intentionally caused tragedy that used airplanes as weapons.