A pilot had some chilling final words before another aircraft crashed into his, resulting in the deadliest passenger plane crash in history.
On March 27, 1977, the island of Tenerife was the site of the deadliest aviation accident in history when two Boeing 747s collided on a runway, killing 583 people.
The crash occurred at Los Rodeos Airport (now known as Tenerife North), and is often referred to as the "Tenerife airport disaster".
KLM Flight 4805, mistakenly believing it had been cleared for takeoff, began accelerating down the foggy runway, as reported by SimpleFlying.
Unbeknownst to the KLM crew, Pan Am Flight 1736 was still taxiing on the same runway, attempting to clear it.
Due to poor weather conditions, KLM pilot Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten and first officer Klaas Meurs could not see the Pan Am aircraft ahead of them.
Neither plane had originally been scheduled to land there but had been redirected there due to an emergency diversion caused by a bomb explosion at the nearby Las Palmas airport.
The two Boeing 747s waited for hours on the tarmac as an unusually dense fog descended over the airport. Eventually, air traffic control instructed the KLM flight to taxi to the end of the runway and turn around.
Pan Am was told to follow behind, but the KLM crew mistakenly believed they had been cleared for takeoff.
“The Pan Am pilots heard this, became startled, clicked their mic to say, ‘Hey, we’re still on the runway,’” explained Patrick Smith, a commercial airline pilot and aviation author, per CBS News.
However, due to radio interference, the KLM crew did not hear the message. Assuming they had clearance, the KLM plane began its takeoff roll, barreling down the foggy runway directly toward the still-taxiing Pan Am jet.
Bob Bragg, the first officer of the Pan Am flight, recounted the terrifying moment in an interview with CBS News:
“As soon as I saw the man moving and coming at us, I started saying, ‘Get off!’ As we were turning to the left, I looked back out of my side window, and that’s when he had lifted off the ground and become airborne, right as close to us as I could see him.”
The chilling final words of the Pan Am pilot were captured on the cockpit voice recording.
"There he is!" shouted captain Victor Grubbs. "Look at him! Goddamn, that son of a b**** is coming!"
Seconds later, the two aircraft collided, resulting in the deadliest aviation disaster on record, claiming 583 lives.
All 248 passengers and crew aboard the KLM flight were killed. There were also 335 fatalities and 61 survivors on the Pan Am flight, per the Federal Aviation Administration.
One of those survivors, Joan Feathers, recalled the harrowing escape in an interview with CBS correspondent Jeff Glor.
“I sat there thinking, ‘This is the end.’ So as we made our way to the side of the plane, all these little implosions of fire, I just felt that it was imminent," she said.
"I did not want to burn up. So there was a doctor from Chicago that had been in the plane and he was down below and he said, ‘Jump, I’ll catch you.’”
Feathers described the scene as she ran for safety: “I could tell that there were a lot of these little fires that were getting bigger, so I kept running. And it wasn’t maybe fifteen seconds and the plane went up like an atom bomb. … It just phewww, and then a huge fire.”
Investigations placed most of the blame on KLM pilot Jacob van Zanten, a highly respected and experienced aviator who had even been the face of KLM in advertisements.
“He was on KLM billboards and in KLM advertisements,” said Smith. “And one of the famous little nuggets of the story is that when word got back to KLM that one of their planes had crashed, they went looking for Captain van Zanten to go to the scene to figure out what happened, unaware that he was actually the captain.”
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