Risk register · entry
Q3 · EngineeredTenerife collision
The deadliest crash in aviation history happened on the ground.
Tightly coupled systems where one small fault cascades and takes down the whole machine.
Why this room
The starting mechanism, standardized ATC clearance and airport-capacity protocol, is a classic Q3 Engineered risk with a simple, well-modeled payoff and thin tails, but a genuine tail event, bomb diversion plus fog plus duty-time pressure plus cockpit hierarchy, pushed the payoff into the fat-tailed, catastrophic, human-decision-driven territory that separates Q3 from Q4.
The record
- Date: 27 March 1977, approximately 17:06 GMTcertain
- Total deaths: 583certain
- Survivors: 61, all from the Pan Am aircraft's forward sectioncertain
- KLM Flight 4805 deaths: 248 (all aboard)certain
- Pan Am Flight 1736 deaths: 335 of 396 aboardcertain
- Aircraft: KLM Boeing 747-206B registration PH-BUF; Pan Am Boeing 747-121 registration N736PAcertain
- Visibility reduced to under 100 meters in drifting fog at time of collisionlikely
- Las Palmas (Gran Canaria) airport bombing by Canary Islands separatists occurred that morning, forcing the diversion to Los Rodeoscertain
- Second airport, Tenerife South, opened 1978 partly in response to congestion exposed by the disasterlikely
- KLM compensation to victims' families reported in a range of roughly $58,000 to $600,000 per claimuncertain
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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