The Tenerife Airport Disaster: Aviation's Worst Nightmare

That was such a change up 😂 from morbid accident to want a good way to shave ya nuts fellas??

Can’t help but feel sorry for Van Zanten… he‘s the first to blame for the disaster, but fate played an important, cruel role here. The thought of refuelling must have crossed his mind when he desperately tried to avoid the Pan Am plane… it took just a few seconds, but they were enough to understand he unwillingly doomed all his passengers. He was to blame above everyone else, but it wasn’t just his fault

As many others below commented, everything can be reduced to corporate greed overriding common sense on people out of fear of penalizations or even loss of income, forcing them to choose between following safety regulations (put in place by entities with more reach and power than the corporations, mind you), and potentially provoke the employer's ire.

In this particular instance, over 500 people paid the price, including the man forced to make a choice he should never have had to make in the first place, and hope for the best.

The idiot controller told PanAm to make a 135 degree turn in his lousy, heavily accented English. Totally unprofessional use of nonstandard terminology

Grim subject matter but a good video as ever.

I can remember this crash happening when I was a kid, 9 or 10 years old. It's even more shocking now! That was fucked...

The Titanic sinking, and the subsequent loss of life, was the reason why the passenger ship rules and regulations were overhauled. It's unfortunate that it takes such tragedies for needed safety to be put into place.

The original terrorists who detonated the bomb actually said that they regretted that this crash happened

theres a modern video of someone taking off without clearance, and man you wanna see an ATC guy mad shoo that pilot will likely never fly again.

This should be counted under terrorism. Those terrorists basically caused the disaster.

If you don't have clearance to take off, you don't have clearance. Full stop. End of story. If you don't hear a message clearly, ask for a retransmission. The other mistakes are only things, if they didn't happen, would have compensated for this mistake.

I used to work for an airline. The hierarchy is still there, nobody cares what a junior is saying. And most of the flights aren’t 100% safe - I’ve seen and experienced terrible things.

It's called the "Black" box, not because of it's color, but for much more ominous reasons.

I just wanna say, your facial hair is always so neat and it’s so satisfying

Jeff Styles is a cousin of mine. Super nice guy

Man that gives me the jee bee's.. no way mate . That's a beast.. I'll be gone ..lol love your videos. Crazy lol. Thankyou for your work .

Everybody new exept vanzantin

When the accident happened, KLM Executives went looking for Veldhuyzen Van Zanten to have him lead their investigation not realising that it was him who basically flew the KLM at Max Power into the PAN AM

I wonder what the terrorists felt when they heard of the accident. It seems they just wanted to make a political statement by setting off a bomb that was supposed to kill no-one but instead caused the worst aviation crash in history.

Wankers

This was totally the KLM captain's fault. He was arrogant and made reckless decisions.

Not forgetting the Dan Air flight from Manchester which crashed in Tenerife in the summer of 1980 which killed all on board.

confirmation bias played a big role here

We now use ADM (Aeronautical Decision Making) and CRM (Crew/Cockpit Resource Management) drilled into us from hour 1. Ask any other pilot about ADM and CRM and you you will get a long valuable conversation about how we use this stop this chain of errors. It is an extremely valuable lifesaving way of preventing another Tenerife, among other catastrophes.

Minor correction on the English language bit. ATC controllers and pilots are pretty much required to learn Aviation English(1), an artificial dialect of English that is more structured and strict with its rules and has a much smaller official vocabulary. If I recall correctly, pilots that fly international routes are strongly encouraged(1) to have a Level 4 proficiency in Aviation English, as do all ATC controllers. Unfortunately, native English speakers are almost automatically given Level 6 Mastery of Aviation English and this causes issues with English-fluent pilots communicating in colloquial English instead of proper Aviation English. From what I understand, there are discussions about being more strict about meeting the proficiency requirements for English fluent pilots.

(1) Officially, there is no international law about this (though there should be), just a very strong suggestion. However, since pretty much every country requires that any pilot flying in their airspace be proficient in Aviation English there effectively is such a law.

It is interesting and worrying that there were 8 incidents in the USA from 9 Janaury 2023 to 7 March 2023 where aircraft narrowly missed colliding whilst taking off or landing 😲

but before we find out how this terrible tragedy happened allow me to talk to you about shaving ya nuts! not the best timing, simon lol

If you like these videos like i do you should check out (Mentor pilot) hes an active airline pilot he flies a 747-800 last i heard an he does these kinds of videos all the time. I love his videos. An he has covered this exact accident just in much more detail

The best part of this video is that Simon can talk about Manscaped without laughing.

How ironic! The biggest aircraft disaster occurs on the ground. That's obvious though because There is more space in the air. MUCH MORE. This is also why flying is safer than driving. You have much more space in the air.

Isn't there something lacking? To my knowledge it was proven from a recording that in the air traffic control tower there was a football match on.... although they denied that they were distracted, there's room for debate here!

Another irony, Van Zanten was the safety expert for KLM. The company president even told someone to call Van Zanten to investigate the incident before he found out Van Zanten was the involved pilot.

The first major incident CRM was credited with mitigating was United 232. On that flight, a DC-10 instructor was on board, and became a 4th member of the cockpit. Between the four of them, an airplane that should have fallen like a brick from the sky was nearly landed successfully. Half of those on board were ultimately lost (a crash on approach; the thought of an actual approach is impossible to imagine with a plane as crippled as this one was, but they actually managed to control this aircraft enough to attempt a quasi normal approach), but had it not been for those 4 men working in sync, inevitably it would have resulted in all on board lost.

See Mentour Pilot's review of this incident.

There were three causes to this accident: Van Zanten, Van Zanten, and Van Zanten. He did not have minimums for takeoff.

VanZanten was an ignorant martinet, who is the ultimate cause of this accident.

Ironic the greatest aviation disaster took place on the ground

I wonder if they had slammed max brakes and full reversers, if the disaster would have been lessened rather than just trying to firewall it and take off. Perhaps the KLM could have swerved the opposite way to the Pan Am.

This incident probably would have been surpassed in fatality numbers in another incident at San Francisco airport at few years ago, in which a plane nearly landed on a taxiway containing three fully loaded jets. One of the pilots on the ground noticed at the last second and disaster was averted, but it's scary how close hundreds of people came to being killed in that moment.

Hope they fired those air controllers who couldn't speak english well as well. One chain node of dysaster dominoes could have been prevented

Saw on another video:
"Ironic the worst aviation accident in history happened on the ground."

After the A380 came online I had an irrational fear of two of those colliding. I was about 17?
Then the super jumbo went out of style except for a few specific long haul flights.

Thhank you.

Thanks for making sure to emphasise how the airline industry's reaction to this disaster (as with any incident) has been to improve machinery, infrastructure, training and procedures in order to stop anything like it from happening again. It's so easy to take an event like this and just mine it for its horror value (add the fact that so many people are scared of flying and you've got immediate clickbait gold); you did the responsible thing by explaining all the individual things that had to go wrong for something this catastrophic to be possible and how many of those things are, nowadays, increasingly unlikely as the industry has used this lesson to improve safety on all levels. I've never been properly scared of flying, but it's treatments like this that make me feel thoroughly safe when I get on a plane.

Remember this crash from childhood. Thanks for the full story

So the crash was caused by an unreasonable safety rule. Government is the height of stupidity.

This is incredible. I heard of the Tenerife air disaster but didn't know that much about it. Talking of terrible collisions, could you do a video on the marchioness incident. When a pleasure craft was hit by dredger in the middle of the Thames.