This particular accident was so lethal that it became world-wide news, a sensation in the media. Here in this series, it's given the length of a feature film, an hour and a half. More than usual attention is paid to the passengers, their enthusiasm and their fatigue. It fills in the time but there's rather a lot of it and the reenactors are adequate but no more than that.
The two airplanes involved are both Boeing 747s, the jumbo jets of the skies, one Pan Am and one KLM. Aboard the Pan Am flight from New York is a passenger named Erma Schlecht. Never fly on the same airplane as someone named Schlecht.
Both airplanes are headed towards Las Palmas, the major airport in the Canary Islands, but a bomb had exploded there a few hours earlier and all flights were diverted to another airport half an hour away. The alternate is a regional airport with only one runway, not designed to handle major traffic, yet the controllers find themselves with dozens of large jets on their hands, with barely enough space to park them, nose to tail. So the airport is jammed. The passengers are tired and impatient and so are the crews. There's a sharp exchange between a KLM 747 that's refueling and the Pan American 747 immediately behind, waiting for take off instructions. Both airplanes finally get the go signal, Pan Am following KLM.
But this is a small and mountainous island and warm Atlantic air is pushed up, over, and between the hills, causing upslope fog and reducing visibility to half a mile or less. The pilots can barely see the pavement. The two airplanes must taxi down to the end of the runway, turn around, and take off into the wind. The nervous Pan Am pilot, second in line on the runway, knows that the Dutch flight will be speeding in his direction soon. He's instructed by the control tower to exit the runway at the third exit on his left but the order is confused, as are the controllers.
The airport has no radar and neither of the jets can be seen because of the thick fog. The KLM flight reaches the end of the runway and make a 180 degree turn just as Pan Am has found an exit and is beginning to turn. Again communication with the tower is garbled and the Dutch pilot believes he's received clearance to take off. He speeds down the runway and carves off the top of the Pan Am' s fuselage, the wreckage of KLM landing about 1500 feet away, with all the passengers and crew killed.
The fog is impenetrable and the tower doesn't even realize that there has been a crash until an airplane circling the field reports flames. Emergency responders rush to the nearest wreckage, the KLM flight, but they can't see the burning Pan Am airplane a quarter of a mile away, so it takes twenty minutes for emergency vehicles to find it. Twenty percent of those aboard Pan Am survive. All together 583 people died, almost twice as many deaths as in any previous accident.
The investigation doesn't take long and in fact the program has already laid out the causes, breaking away from the usual detective story format. The American investigators blamed the KLM pilot and the Dutch authorities blamed the bad English of the air traffic controllers. It all started with a terrorist's bomb.
