DISASTER ON TENERIFE
AFTER A SEVERAL-HOUR DELAY, THE PASSENGERS ON PAN AM 1736 WERE FINALLY RELAXING—THEIR PLANE WAS GETTING READY TO TAKE OFF. EVERYONE ON THE CHARTERED BOEING 747 WAS ONLY MINUTES AWAY FROM THE BEGINNING OF A MUCH-ANTICIPATED MEDITERRANEAN CRUISE VACATION.
In the first-class section, Caroline Hopkins finished letters she’d been writing to her two daughters. Next to her, husband Warren slipped a magazine into his seatback pocket. Through the cabin, other passengers settled back for what was supposed to be a short flight from Tenerife to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where everyone would be bused to their waiting cruise ship.
The Pan Am jumbo jet was moving slowly down Tenerife’s single runway when the passengers felt a sudden sharp swerve to the left. Back in the economy section, passenger Isobel Monda immediately looked out the nearest window. “The damn fool’s going to run off the runway!” she gasped to her husband Tony.
In fact, driving the jet off the runway was exactly what Captain Victor Grubbs and his first officer, Robert Bragg, were trying to do. The reason was simple and horrible: They had suddenly seen a KLM 747 speeding down the foggy runway directly toward them. Grubbs and his crew were trying desperately to get out of the way, even if that meant getting stuck in the soft grass adjacent to the runway.
But they didn’t make it.
On March 27, 1977, shortly after 5 p.m. local time, Pan Am 1736 and KLM 4805 collided on the runway of Los Rodeos Airport in the Canary Islands. More than four decades later, the crash remains the worst disaster in aviation history, killing 583 people, injuring dozens and creating lifelong trauma for thousands.
How could this have happened?
