Tenerife Crash & Emergency Response

Tenerife Crash & Emergency Response

Aircraft Crash & Emergency Management

The crash I chose to report on is the Tenerife airport disaster of Sunday, March 27, 1977 on the Los Rodeos Airport on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The Tenerife crash involved two airplanes on an unscheduled stop after a bomb exploded at the Grand Canaria airport causing them to divert. The first plane was Pan Am Flight 1736 a Boeing 747-121 called the Clipper Victor which had come from Los Angeles International Airport with 380 souls on board. The second was KLM flight 4805 a Boeing 747-206B from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in the Netherlands and had 234 souls aboard.(Driefus, 1978)

At approximately 1:15pm a bomb exploded at the Gran Canaria Airport which diverted all flights to Los Rodeos, an airport not designed for accommodation of these aircraft plus a few more. The airport had only one runway and one major taxiway, all the aircraft at Los Rodeos were so big that they had to be parked on taxiways causing airplanes ready for takeoff to have to taxi down the runway to position themselves for takeoff this is also called runway back taxi.

The weather conditions at the airport on the island at 2077 feet above sea level had high density clouds that varied because of the varying winds causing drifting clouds that would be unhindered at one point and then it would go below minimum visibility the next. The KLM flight was in good visibility while the Pan Am flight had very horrible visibility almost to 330 ft.

Along with the very poor visibility there was a problem with communications between each airliner and the ATC. The KLM pilot did not ask for clearance before increasing throttle to takeoff, he was warned by his co-pilot and he told him to ask for permission while in the middle of already taking off, they asked for clearance from ATC and the tower never cleared them and he thought that when they said “now at takeoff” that they were at the position to get ready...