In keeping with the non-fiction theme I started with my previous mini-review, I recommend “Collision on Tenerife” by Jon Ziomek.
This is one of those books that you probably shouldn’t read while you’re actually sitting on an airplane. Especially if it’s a foggy day.
It is a detailed account of the world’s worst aviation accident: two fully-loaded 747s collided in the Canary Islands on March 27, 1977, killing 583 people.
It was a devastating culmination of a series of bad decisions, bad weather, bad geography, and bad luck. One of the planes was behind schedule. The KLM pilot unnecessarily had his plane’s fuel “topped off” (increasing the plane’s weight). The airport on the other island was temporarily closed due to a terrorist bombing. Delay after delay meant Tenerife’s notorious afternoon fog settled against the mountains that abutted the airport, reducing visibility to near zero.
Ziomek masterfully combines survivor accounts, news stories, and official reports to give us a thorough understanding of what happened and why, and lets us get to know the survivors and victims. Some reviewers complain about the time Ziomek spends examining the psychology of disasters (the “why” behind people’s reactions or non-reactions) but out of a nearly 300 page book [the 2020 Post Hill Press paperback] it’s not that many pages, and I found it interesting. Some reviewers also complain about the technical aviation details, but some of those details are crucial to understanding what went wrong in the communication between pilots and control tower. It wasn’t until after this tragedy that international aviation adopted the very specific terminology (for taxiing and departing aircraft) that was already in use in U.S. aviation.
The one detail that sticks in my mind the most, several months after I read the book, is “three minutes.”
Only the people who climbed out of the burning Pan Am plane within the first three minutes survived. The people who froze in fear and indecision, or who waited to be told what to do, died. [Survivors, of which there were about 70, estimated there were another 30 individuals who survived the initial impact.] Only those who moved, who helped themselves, who sought an escape route survived. There were no survivors from the KLM plane, and there was no survivor from the Pan Am plane past the three minute mark.
In that vein, one of those survivors, David Alexander, has written his own book: 2015’s “Never Wait for the Firetruck” – I’m adding that to my reading list.
The Far Places 