You don't need to lurch headlong through the history books to get the sense that the most prudent thing you can do in this life is to stay in bed. That's wisdom you can glean just from perambulating the boulevard at the lunch hour. But it's in history that we discover humanity's entangled ironies, the twists of providence and their common by-product, unspeakable disaster.
Or something.
Not many will notice, but today, March 27, for example, is the 25th anniversary of the world's worst aviation accident, a catastrophe so tortured by seemingly unrelated events and improbably critical minutiae that it's as chilling this morning as it was a quarter-century ago.
The collision of two 747s on a runway in the Canary Islands March 27, 1977, though it still tops the gore charts for historical crash carnage, never drew quite the air disaster coverage we're too familiar with today. Perhaps it was because it was not so much a plane crash as a traffic accident, and perhaps it was that gravity, air travel's ageless arch rival, played no role, nor did any of the familiar gremlins of the unfriendly skies. Perhaps it was because it happened on the other side of the Atlantic, or perhaps because even though Maria Callas and Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford and Bing Crosby and Guy Lombardo and Groucho Marx and Elvis Presley all died in 1977, none of them died on that day in that spot.
New spinners will tell you that for aviation disasters, three planes into three iconic American buildings and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, all within a shattering 82 minutes of a September morning, render any other measurement moot. But it says here that acts of war and/or of cold-blooded murder are separate categories.
The Canary Island conflagration, topically enough, also started with an act of terrorism. A small group of separatists, agitating for the independence of the island of Las Palmas from Spain, set off a crude bomb near a flower shop inside the Las Palmas airport. It was of no staggering consequence.
Not for the moment.
But the terminal was closed and some incoming flights diverted.
Just after noon on that Sunday, two of those flights, Dutch KLM 4805, toting Easter tourists to these pristine islands off the coast of Morocco, and Pan Am 1736, carrying Los Angeles and New York passengers who were hooking up with a cruise, landed instead at the airport at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, just one hop west in the Canary archipelago. The KLM plane landed about 1:40 p.m., the Pan Am flight about 20 minutes later, and both got herded by traffic control to overtaxed gate areas, the result of the Las Palmas closing. In the next hour, at least six more flights landed at Tenerife, where the airport was neither equipped nor constructed to handle a phalanx of huge jets.
After a wait of more than two hours in which passengers stayed on the planes, sipped drinks and talked about the bad weather, an afternoon fog settled. When clearance was finally given for the planes to fly on to Las Palmas, the KLM plane was refueling in a spot that blocked the taxi path of the Pan Am plane. The Pan Am crew disembarked onto the tarmac to see if they could maneuver their own 747 around the giant KLM plane and jump into the takeoff queue. There wasn't enough room. Almost, but not enough. No big deal.
Not for the moment.
When the KLM plane was ready, it was to taxi to the end of the runway, turn around, and wait for clearance. The Pan Am plane was to follow down the same runway, but turn off into a holding area so that the runway would be clear for the Dutch crew. As the Pan Am crew watched the KLM plane's tail lights disappear into the mist, it was still some 400 yards from the holding area. The next thing it saw were not taillights.
They were headlights. It was 5:07 p.m.
The Dutch crew had reached the runway's end, U-turned, and gunned its engines for takeoff. History attributes it to miscommunication, perhaps due to the heavy Spanish accents of the tower controllers, perhaps because of a garbled cockpit transmission.
The Pan Am crew could only turn the 747's nose slightly to the left, a maneuver that saved 69 lives. The Dutch pilot tried to take off prematurely, but didn't have the necessary speed. The collision, described in an Associated Press dispatch from March 30, 1977 as "a hellstorm of fire and death," killed all 248 people on the Dutch plane and 335 on the Pan Am flight, putting the number 583 into the world's almanacs and Guinness compilations under "world's worst."
And for much more than the moment.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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