On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife. Both aircraft had been diverted there after a bomb incident closed Gran Canaria airport, and the small regional field was congested and shrouded in fog when a KLM 747 began its take-off roll while a Pan Am 747 was still taxiing on the same runway.
583 people died, making it the deadliest accident in aviation history. Sixty-one people on the Pan Am aircraft survived; there were no survivors from the KLM flight. The investigation found no single cause but a chain of factors including ambiguous radio phraseology, a blocked transmission, fog, and pressure on the KLM crew to depart before duty-time limits.
In this episode we walk through the minutes before the collision, the cockpit dynamics, and the changes to standard phraseology and crew resource management that followed.
