Maybe you have heard of it and maybe you don’t, but the chance is very big that you have heard of it : the Tenerife accident with two Boeings one from Panam Air and one from the Dutch KLM. The two planes collided at each other with fairly high speed which caused 583 fatal injuries. For me it was always a question that how could this happen and make the life of 583 people fatal? There is no “answer” to that question, but “answers” because it had as many reasons as most complicated fatal crashes do. A bit too less sleep, a bit fog, a busy airport and a stubborn captain on the Boeing 747 from the KLM were the ingredients of this catastrophic accident. This were the causes, but it is certainly interresant to know how it went in chronic order. The airport was very busy that moment of the day when the two aircrafts arrived and fog was created. The crew of the airport couldn’t see any planes and the Boeing’s couldn’t see each other too until the distance between them was a hundred metres.
Learning from failures
