“We’re going!”
Captain Van Zanten pushed the throttles of his KLM Boeing 747 forward. Assuming (?) he had take-off clearance. It will never be clear what went through his mind that moment, how he had judged the situation. Just before, his First Officer had warned him he had no clearance yet.
As the plane accelerated, the Flight Engineer (whose main job in the process was over in that stage) picked up a radio message between the control tower and another plane : ‘report when off the runway!’
“Is he not clear, that Pan American?” he asked.
But the captain and the First Officer, (focused on the take-off), waved his concerns.
The Flight Engineer had drawn the right conclusion : the Pan American was still on the runway, ahead of them, hidden in the fog. Due to the congestion on the tarmac, taxying was only possible over the only runway of Los Rodeos Airport, Tenerife. The Pan American Boeing 747 was moving slowly forward. Captain Grubbs and his crew were desperately looking for the ‘third exit’, the control tower had instructed them to take, to exit the runway. But the dense fog made it even difficult to discern the edges of the runway.
Suddenly, Grubbs noticed the KLM Boeing, coming straight to them at take-off speed. Grubbs tried to steer his plane from the runway, Van Zanten tried a premature rotation, and got his plane airborne, but the collision was inevitable. All 248 crew and passengers of the KLM plane and 335 of the 396 in the Pan American, all together 583 people, perished, making it then and up to today, the air disaster with the highest death toll. It was the result of a chain of events, of confusion, target fixation, an underequipped and understaffed airport, not sticking to standard procedure phrasing in radio messages, disturbance of crucial radio communications, tired crews, and it all shrouded under a thick fog that prevented the crews to see each other’s planes and the control tower to see the movements of the aircraft.
Today, 27 March 2017, is the 40th anniversary of the Tenerife air disaster.
