Mid Air Collision
Two Boeing 747s. One fog-covered runway. 583 dead. The worst crash in aviation history didn’t even happen in the air.
March 27, 1977 — Tenerife, Canary Islands. A bomb threat at Gran Canaria forced multiple jets to divert to the smaller Los Rodeos Airport. Among them: a KLM flight and a Pan Am flight, both jumbo jets. The airport was overwhelmed, the runway was jammed — and then the fog rolled in.
What happened next became a textbook case in how things can go fatally wrong.
With visibility near zero, the KLM captain — Jacob van Zanten — mistakenly thought he had clearance and began takeoff. But the Pan Am 747 was still taxiing on the same runway.
Radio calls overlapped. Warnings came too late. Seconds later, the KLM jet slammed into the Pan Am aircraft at over 150 knots.
Everyone aboard the KLM flight died. Most on the Pan Am flight did too.
Tenerife changed aviation forever: clearer radio phraseology, mandatory cockpit teamwork, and the invention of crew resource management. But none of that helped the 583 people who never left the runway.
