“Evacuate the airport, we’ve planted bombs,” a terrorist tells the telephone operator at the airport in Gran Canaria, in 1977. By the end of that day, 583 people will have lost their lives – but not to a bomb explosion.
The planes are diverted to the neighboring island of Tenerife. Loaded with passengers, they’re forced to sit on the hot tarmac for hours. Meanwhile, the flight crews rely on air traffic control to keep them updated.
Two Boeing 747s are waiting for thick fog to lift so that they can begin the journey home; they’re anxious to receive clearance to take off. One of them has just taken on a hefty 15,000 gallons of fuel. What unfolds next is the most deadly aviation accident in history.
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Further reading
Collision on Tenerife: The How and Why of the World’s Worst Aviation Disaster is a comprehensive account by author Jon Ziomek and Caroline Hopkins, one of the Pan Am survivors. Fellow survivor David Alexander’s book is called Never Wait For The Fire Truck.
We drew on a range of official reports into the accident, including those conducted by the Airline Pilots Association, the Netherlands Aviation Safety Board, Spain’s Subsecretaria de Aviacion Civil, and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The websites Project Tenerife and Peter’s Tenerife Crash Page contain further useful resources, along with reportage in outlets such as Salon, the Los Angeles Times and the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
For more on the Moses Illusion, see From Words to Meaning: A Semantic Illusion and A case study of anomaly detection: Shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment. For attempts to avoid the Moses Illusion in air communications, see A Guide to Phraseology for General Aviation Pilots in Europe.
For more on the fight, flight and freeze response, see Walter B. Cannon and the Invisible Rays, The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions, Why People ‘Freeze’ in an Emergency, Freeze for action: neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing, and Fear and the Defense Cascade.Collision on Tenerife: The How and Why of the World’s Worst Aviation Disaster is a comprehensive account by author Jon Ziomek and Caroline Hopkins, one of the Pan Am survivors. Fellow survivor David Alexander’s book is called Never Wait For The Fire Truck.
We drew on a range of official reports into the accident, including those conducted by the Airline Pilots Association, the Netherlands Aviation Safety Board, Spain’s Subsecretaria de Aviacion Civil, and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The websites Project Tenerife and Peter’s Tenerife Crash Page contain further useful resources, along with reportage in outlets such as Salon, the Los Angeles Times and the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
For more on the Moses Illusion, see From Words to Meaning: A Semantic Illusion and A case study of anomaly detection: Shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment. For attempts to avoid the Moses Illusion in air communications, see A Guide to Phraseology for General Aviation Pilots in Europe.
For more on the fight, flight and freeze response, see Walter B. Cannon and the Invisible Rays, The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions, Why People ‘Freeze’ in an Emergency, Freeze for action: neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing, and Fear and the Defense Cascade.
