If the instruction from ATC seemed odd and "mystified" the crew, the pilots should have questioned it formally to the tower (not only amongst themselves) and asked for clarification. Clearly ATC wasn't on the ball that day, and not focused on monitoring aircraft activity as he should have been. A very tragic event that could have been prevented.
The ATC killed 146 men women and children that day in April 1980 . Sending the aircraft towards the mountains apparently he gave the same fatal instructions to Britannia Boeing 737 and a British airtours but thankfully the chose to ignore the ATC and followed the correct route
My amateur aviation geek's assessment is 25% blame to the crew, 75% to ATC. The instructions were absurdly confusing. Plus the fact that the Spanish government did not invest in state of the art radar equipment after the horrific KLM/PanAm disaster 3 years prior is utterly astonishing. Between 1972 and 1980, 884 people lost their lives in crashes at Tenerife. That Spanish official is un mentiroso tramposo and he knows it.
I agree with those percentages. As far as Spain is concerned, it was still a fascist dictatorship until 1975 and took about 10 years to get out of that mentality. Dictatorships probably think it's a waste of time to spend money on things like radar at a civilian airport. All they care about is people at the top, not ordinary people using ordinary airports. For instance, the government airports probably got radar installed as soon as possible, because important people were using them.
Foreign controllers will routinely (even today) not query incorrect read backs from flight crew who are in receipt of ambiguous clearances/instructions. Having said that in the case of an aircraft commander, he is ultimately responsible for terrain clearance.
Tragic. However, this is now a classic case for teaching 'crew resource management' lessons to save other lives. Blame is surely shared here. The Dan Air crew failed to clarify instructions and they had a loss of situational awareness by flying towards high ground in cloud below minimum safe altitude. They also failed to pick-up on clues from each other such as the leading questions asked. Wisdom with hindsight and from the armchair of an old man. My experience with the 727 is in different circumstances. The Air Traffic Control failed to manage at quite a few levels and the Spanish (much as I like them) shamefully played politics with the whole thing.
@Bridxb Of course... I agree with you two but this case is not one of those for sure! The controller gave the crew a wrong instruction which has changed the path of the plain. There's no "chain of events" here! After all these years we still wonder why the crew didn't ask for clarification but the fact remains that they heard "turn to the left" loud and clear and that's what they did !!!
8:55 - does he even understands the question? If the air controller had said "turns" instead of "turn" the accident wouldn't have happened. Is not that hard to understand.
@Exagerative Was never an ACI episode but would like to have seen it considered. It was a ground breaking accident in terms of communication and therefore worthy of inclusion, also because it is the worst ever air disaster involving a British airliner to this day.
The only other upload I've yet seen for this superb investigative documentary is cut way short as was this and yet I don't see any comments to that effect and can't find any indication of this being a multipart nor can I find any follow on parts so am I going mad or missing something (other than the rest of this doccie)? I just want to watch the full investigation :( this is a fascinating study given that it happened at the infamous and deadly Tenerife and to one of the most criticized airlines of the time involving one of my favorite aircraft of all time...
All 4 parts of this video are on the same channel. Just click on the channel page and then the videos page and all 4 of them are there. It's a bit confusing because the uploader has used exactly the same title for all 4 videos, instead of labelling them "part one", "part two", etc.
@xxxzzzzuuu In some part I agree with your point, it's simply evolution. Planes crash because of a sequence of unforeseen events. Unfortunately 140+ passengers died simply because it was 31 years ago, with no radar, weak communication procedures, etc. Yes the crew should have queried the instruction, even though it wasn't in their mandate at the time. Cont.....
Well they are the people responsible for the safety of the plane and they have ultimate authority. The spanish guy isn't wrong he's just a weasel. There were many opportunities for the pilots to rectify the situation up to and including the point at which they got the GPWS warnings. When you get those you're supposed stop turning and make the steepest climb you can without stalling (you should be getting intermittent stick shaking). It is entirely possible that procedures were different in 1980 so absolutely it could be the procedures fault, though I have to doubt that the approved procedures involved banking into a stall. The ATC certainly isn't blameless but they weren't working under ideal circumstances and this kind of crash requires multiple mistakes from both sides to happen. Honestly, I would tend towards the pilots being the ones making more mistakes and, ultimately, were the ones putting the plane into a dangerous situation. I think that it's a far cry from one of these accidents that were due to pure incompetence or wanton disregard for safety though, it's just one of those tragic incidents where the circumstances came to be to let it happen.
@@Person01234 Would the plane have crashed if ATC had spaced the flights properly? Would the plane have crashed if ATC hadn't issued the improvised and poorly-phrased holding pattern? Unless you can answer yes to either question, it was definitely the fault of ATC. They were worse than useless in this situation. The pilots would have been better off at an uncontrolled airfield.
why oh why didn't the crew question the atc instructions.had it been a clear day............r.i.p all that were lost and condolences to the families of those who lost loved ones
One possible explanation: it's a well-known phenomenon that when English-speaking pilots are speaking to someone whose English isn't that good, they prefer not to question them again and again, even if they should, because they're afraid that the situation might get even more confused - ie, the air traffic controller might have misunderstood what they were questioning, and therefore it's easier not to say anything else. The same thing is believed to have happened with the 1977 Tenerife crash when the Pan Am crew didn't question the ACT about which taxi-way they were supposed to take, even though they were confused about it.
What he should have said was "the holding pattern will be anti-clockwise", which is counter-clockwise for Americans. But someone with limited English was unlikely to say that.
But having said that I think the ATC bears some of the blame. He didn't give clear instructions and the Spanish didn't want to say that for 2 reasons, one he's still alive two they would have had to pay compensation and they didn't want to do that. You have to remember that Spain and tenerife were at the time very poor countries, I can remember going there around that time and I was shocked to realise how low the wages were
6:25 - What a poor and sad excuse! It does NOT matter if the crew repeated or not the instruction. When the controller said "TURN TO THE LEFT" that's exactly what the crew heard and it would not make any difference for any of the parts (crew and controller) repeating this instruction. The only thing we could all expect would be "Roger". SAD excuse !!!
How about atc give the correct information in the first place! ATC completely at fault for taking the plane into a mountain. If in doubt as the pilots were, they should seek clarity, easy for me to say I guess.
I saw that in that times Tenerife Airport was the worst of the world 3 crashes in 8 years(1972,1977 and 1980).So that was probably a bad idea to visit Tenerife in that times because it would happen aguan.
It was a bad idea because they put the airport in a very bad position, next to a mountain and where there was often fog. As soon as they built the new airport in 1978 it was okay. This flight was going to the old airport.
Not questioning unclear ATC instructions. Losing situation awareness (position and minimum safe altitude). Descending below safe altitude while being unsure of their position in a non-radar environment. Deciding to climb away late when having been in doubt for quite some time about their position. Turning during the terrain escape maneuver. Yes ATC sucked. But there was a lot of CRM lessons to take away from this tragedy. This could have been avoided.
...... They were given an unpublished hold involving a misquoted "Turn to the left" instead of "Turns", when expecting a straight in approach. Repeating back instructions etc are now standard because of this accident. It has nothing to do with racism. Despite this, the Captain is responsible for the aircraft's position.
Really out of place and of poor taste your comment. Ten un poco de respeto que estamos hablando de seres humanos que fallecieron. Siempre tiene que haber un listillo que nos deja en mal lugar a los españoles.
The truth of the matter is the following. Can someone answer me why passanger jet planes were allowed to fly to a tiny airport high in the mountains that did not even have radar!!!!!!
As far as I can see it was the captains fault he wasn't sure about what the air traffic control had told him to do but even so he didn't call back and ask them to repeat what they said. This I can't understand if you are not sure about something you check so why wouldn't he when so many lives including his own were depending on him. Right at the start they said the captain was an experienced pilot and he had been to this airport over 50 times so he knew that they had mountain's and where they were, if he didn't then I wouldn't call him a very good pilot. So why didn't he open his mouth all those lives could have been saved if he had done
Unfortunately, this was typical of the Spanish authorities at the time, and for some time following. If the aircraft involved in the incident was not Spanish, then it was automatically the fault of the flight crew or crews, as they tried to do with the Tenerife air disaster, also at Los Rodeos. For one thing, based on the emotional state the air traffic controller was undoubtedly in having just learned his mother was dying of terminal cancer, he was clearly not in a suitable mental condition to be working, let alone at a time when Los Rodeos was having one of its all-to-common technical failures. To perform his role effectively under those conditions and in view of the meteorological conditions, he needed to be able to maintain a three-dimensional picture of ALL the aircraft in his area, which he clearly absolutely failed to do, thus letting the 727 get too close to Iberia prop forcing him to put the Dan Air 727 into the improper holding pattern. To compound this, he then issued an effective order to the Dan Air crew to assume a flight path that was taking the aircraft into hazardous terrain at an instructed altitude massively below the minimum safe altitude. Pretty much from the time they began their descent the Dan Air crew would have had no visual clues to their position and their relationship to the mountains so they were utterly reliant on air traffic control and what information was available on their instruments to keep the aircraft out of trouble as they were being directed to fly an unapproved and very unsafe course which they would have no familiarity or "feel" for. Nonetheless, the experienced pilot had enough knowledge to realise that something was very wrong, but sadly too late to save the aircraft, though only barely. In the years since this has happened the way that pilots can interact with air traffic control have been considerably altered, so now a pilot can query instructions from ATC that they have concerns about, but back when the pilot of the accident aircraft was trained ATC's word was second only to God's, and you could potentially get you log book blotted if you questioned or disagreed with ATC without having a damn good reason to, a situation that remained in commercial aviation in many countries for a considerable time after this event. The pilots followed the instructions given to them, incorrectly, by a stressed air traffic controller who didn't have his mind on his job, and he flew the plane into a mountain. I certainly disagree that spatial disorientation for the pilots can really be argued as a cause as the pilots retained enough spatial orientation, even in unfamiliar terrain, to have at least started to recover the aircraft from the situation it was put in by going full power on, climb and initiate a right turn which their spatial awareness indicated was taking them away from an inevitable crash. Sadly, they failed by a few seconds and not very many feet, impacting the terrain not far from the crest of the terrain over which a considerable amount of wreckage subsequently travelled. This was absolutely and unequivocally the directly entire fault of the air traffic controller, and indirectly the fault of the Spanish government in continuing to allow the commercial use of Los Rodeos airport long past the stage where it had become demonstrably unsuitable for the level and type of traffic it was expected to take...
Interesting comment. The strange thing is that the new airport on the south of Tenerife had already opened at the time of this crash. Maybe it was full up with other flights.
God almighty, if it is this easy to make such huge catastrophic mistakes, I will never EVER be able to rest easy in my cabin seat again. I don't care how often they repeat it back. 'Turn' instead of 'turns'?
This occurred in 1980. There have been numerous avionics improvements since then (eg Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System) etc. Not to mention the terrain alerting systems operating at controller workstations. Terrain avoidance and situational awareness is now heavily integrated into crew resource management and forms an important part of the descent and departure briefings conducted on the flight deck. You’re in safe hands.
It was largely the fault of the crew, compounded slightly by ground control. Simply questioning the orders would have prevented the crash. There is denial on both sides which is inevitable. It seems very primitive that there were no real navigation aids which again would have allowed errors to have been corrected. Being confused and picking at the meaning of an ambiguous order wasn't good enough. Simply asking for a repeat would have saved the plane.
Can't for the life of me see how the Spanish came be blamed for this - despite the rhetoric of the bloke from the Airline Pilots Association. The pilot had apparently flown to Tenerife 50 times - surely he knows there a fkkin big mountain called Teide on the island........so WHY fly towards it?
You have to remember, this is a 727 in 1980! There’s no GPS, no moving map, no terrain display. Just VOR, NDB and possibly DME. In IMC, after following an ambiguous ATC instruction, it would have been very easy to lose situational awareness.
@@MartinNeep The captain knew the position of the second radio beacon, and he knew the direction from which he was approaching it. Even flying blind he had to know that to his right was the ocean and to the left mountains. It makes no sense to then follow an instruction to "turn left." What kind of instruction is that anyway? Just turn left? How much to the left? 15°, 45°, 90°? It mystifies me as to why he wouldn't have asked for clarification of the ATC instruction.
If the instruction from ATC seemed odd and "mystified" the crew, the pilots should have questioned it formally to the tower (not only amongst themselves) and asked for clarification. Clearly ATC wasn't on the ball that day, and not focused on monitoring aircraft activity as he should have been. A very tragic event that could have been prevented.
It's the ATC's fault this crash occurred, just because every comment left under this vid for the last 7 years has said otherwise...
I'd say it's 90% the ATC's fault.
The ATC killed 146 men women and children that day in April 1980 . Sending the aircraft towards the mountains apparently he gave the same fatal instructions to Britannia Boeing 737 and a British airtours but thankfully the chose to ignore the ATC and followed the correct route
My amateur aviation geek's assessment is 25% blame to the crew, 75% to ATC. The instructions were absurdly confusing. Plus the fact that the Spanish government did not invest in state of the art radar equipment after the horrific KLM/PanAm disaster 3 years prior is utterly astonishing. Between 1972 and 1980, 884 people lost their lives in crashes at Tenerife. That Spanish official is un mentiroso tramposo and he knows it.
I agree with those percentages. As far as Spain is concerned, it was still a fascist dictatorship until 1975 and took about 10 years to get out of that mentality. Dictatorships probably think it's a waste of time to spend money on things like radar at a civilian airport. All they care about is people at the top, not ordinary people using ordinary airports. For instance, the government airports probably got radar installed as soon as possible, because important people were using them.
Foreign controllers will routinely (even today) not query incorrect read backs from flight crew who are in receipt of ambiguous clearances/instructions. Having said that in the case of an aircraft commander, he is ultimately responsible for terrain clearance.
Tragic. However, this is now a classic case for teaching 'crew resource management' lessons to save other lives.
Blame is surely shared here. The Dan Air crew failed to clarify instructions and they had a loss of situational awareness by flying towards high ground in cloud below minimum safe altitude. They also failed to pick-up on clues from each other such as the leading questions asked.
Wisdom with hindsight and from the armchair of an old man. My experience with the 727 is in different circumstances.
The Air Traffic Control failed to manage at quite a few levels and the Spanish (much as I like them) shamefully played politics with the whole thing.
@Bridxb Of course... I agree with you two but this case is not one of those for sure! The controller gave the crew a wrong instruction which has changed the path of the plain. There's no "chain of events" here!
After all these years we still wonder why the crew didn't ask for clarification but the fact remains that they heard "turn to the left" loud and clear and that's what they did !!!
8:55 - does he even understands the question? If the air controller had said "turns" instead of "turn" the accident wouldn't have happened. Is not that hard to understand.
He thinks the crew should have questioned what they were told, but they knew they didn't have much time.
@Exagerative Was never an ACI episode but would like to have seen it considered. It was a ground breaking accident in terms of communication and therefore worthy of inclusion, also because it is the worst ever air disaster involving a British airliner to this day.
The only other upload I've yet seen for this superb investigative documentary is cut way short as was this and yet I don't see any comments to that effect and can't find any indication of this being a multipart nor can I find any follow on parts so am I going mad or missing something (other than the rest of this doccie)? I just want to watch the full investigation :( this is a fascinating study given that it happened at the infamous and deadly Tenerife and to one of the most criticized airlines of the time involving one of my favorite aircraft of all time...
All 4 parts of this video are on the same channel. Just click on the channel page and then the videos page and all 4 of them are there. It's a bit confusing because the uploader has used exactly the same title for all 4 videos, instead of labelling them "part one", "part two", etc.
@xxxzzzzuuu In some part I agree with your point, it's simply evolution. Planes crash because of a sequence of unforeseen events. Unfortunately 140+ passengers died simply because it was 31 years ago, with no radar, weak communication procedures, etc. Yes the crew should have queried the instruction, even though it wasn't in their mandate at the time. Cont.....
Its always easier to pin the blame the meat at the pointy end, especially when theyre not around to attend the subsequent board of inquiry.
Well they are the people responsible for the safety of the plane and they have ultimate authority. The spanish guy isn't wrong he's just a weasel. There were many opportunities for the pilots to rectify the situation up to and including the point at which they got the GPWS warnings. When you get those you're supposed stop turning and make the steepest climb you can without stalling (you should be getting intermittent stick shaking). It is entirely possible that procedures were different in 1980 so absolutely it could be the procedures fault, though I have to doubt that the approved procedures involved banking into a stall.
The ATC certainly isn't blameless but they weren't working under ideal circumstances and this kind of crash requires multiple mistakes from both sides to happen. Honestly, I would tend towards the pilots being the ones making more mistakes and, ultimately, were the ones putting the plane into a dangerous situation. I think that it's a far cry from one of these accidents that were due to pure incompetence or wanton disregard for safety though, it's just one of those tragic incidents where the circumstances came to be to let it happen.
@@Person01234 Would the plane have crashed if ATC had spaced the flights properly? Would the plane have crashed if ATC hadn't issued the improvised and poorly-phrased holding pattern? Unless you can answer yes to either question, it was definitely the fault of ATC. They were worse than useless in this situation. The pilots would have been better off at an uncontrolled airfield.
@@icemachine79 Only if you utterly misunderstand the role of ATC and pilot.
This reminds me of American Airlines flight 965!
Planes should have VFR moving maps
why oh why didn't the crew question the atc instructions.had it been a clear day............r.i.p all that were lost and condolences to the families of those who lost loved ones
One possible explanation: it's a well-known phenomenon that when English-speaking pilots are speaking to someone whose English isn't that good, they prefer not to question them again and again, even if they should, because they're afraid that the situation might get even more confused - ie, the air traffic controller might have misunderstood what they were questioning, and therefore it's easier not to say anything else. The same thing is believed to have happened with the 1977 Tenerife crash when the Pan Am crew didn't question the ACT about which taxi-way they were supposed to take, even though they were confused about it.
Whether it was turn or turns to the left I don't understand why the Air Traffic Controller made this statement.
What he should have said was "the holding pattern will be anti-clockwise", which is counter-clockwise for Americans. But someone with limited English was unlikely to say that.
But having said that I think the ATC bears some of the blame. He didn't give clear instructions and the Spanish didn't want to say that for 2 reasons, one he's still alive two they would have had to pay compensation and they didn't want to do that. You have to remember that Spain and tenerife were at the time very poor countries, I can remember going there around that time and I was shocked to realise how low the wages were
I'd probably put 80% to 90% of the blame on the ATC, and 10% to 20% on the crew.
R. I. P
6:25 - What a poor and sad excuse! It does NOT matter if the crew repeated or not the instruction. When the controller said "TURN TO THE LEFT" that's exactly what the crew heard and it would not make any difference for any of the parts (crew and controller) repeating this instruction. The only thing we could all expect would be "Roger". SAD excuse !!!
Crash.
Haviland comet
MONTSENY 1970
How about atc give the correct information in the first place! ATC completely at fault for taking the plane into a mountain.
If in doubt as the pilots were, they should seek clarity, easy for me to say I guess.
Why didn't the ARC have radar? (It may be pointed out at the beginning, but I missed it).
Most poor countries couldn't afford it at the time, and Spain was a poor country at this time.
the loss of 330 feet make no difference in my view even if they hadn't lost a small amount of altitude they would have just hit the mountain higher up
From what I see, spanish controller is responsible for the crash.
I saw that in that times Tenerife Airport was the worst of the world 3 crashes in 8 years(1972,1977 and 1980).So that was probably a bad idea to visit Tenerife in that times because it would happen aguan.
It was a bad idea because they put the airport in a very bad position, next to a mountain and where there was often fog. As soon as they built the new airport in 1978 it was okay. This flight was going to the old airport.
Trust foreign police and authorities about as much as a looter in a riot
Not questioning unclear ATC instructions.
Losing situation awareness (position and minimum safe altitude).
Descending below safe altitude while being unsure of their position in a non-radar environment.
Deciding to climb away late when having been in doubt for quite some time about their position.
Turning during the terrain escape maneuver.
Yes ATC sucked. But there was a lot of CRM lessons to take away from this tragedy. This could have been avoided.
I think they thought they didn't have time to question the ACT. It might have taken too long.
...... They were given an unpublished hold involving a misquoted "Turn to the left" instead of "Turns", when expecting a straight in approach. Repeating back instructions etc are now standard because of this accident. It has nothing to do with racism. Despite this, the Captain is responsible for the aircraft's position.
Racism? Everyone involved was European, so I don't know how race comes into it.
What about balconing? All those english youngsters trying to land on a pool without ATC clearance and not even a pilot's licence?
Really out of place and of poor taste your comment. Ten un poco de respeto que estamos hablando de seres humanos que fallecieron. Siempre tiene que haber un listillo que nos deja en mal lugar a los españoles.
The truth of the matter is the following. Can someone answer me why passanger jet planes were allowed to fly to a tiny airport high in the mountains that did not even have radar!!!!!!
Things changed very slowly in those days. The new airport had opened in 1978 but it must have already been full of traffic.
As far as I can see it was the captains fault he wasn't sure about what the air traffic control had told him to do but even so he didn't call back and ask them to repeat what they said. This I can't understand if you are not sure about something you check so why wouldn't he when so many lives including his own were depending on him. Right at the start they said the captain was an experienced pilot and he had been to this airport over 50 times so he knew that they had mountain's and where they were, if he didn't then I wouldn't call him a very good pilot. So why didn't he open his mouth all those lives could have been saved if he had done
Interesting how half the comments on here mainly blame the captain, the other half mainly blame the ATC.
What is this air crash investigation 1960 or something?
It's the only copy on CZcams, so I'm pleased to be able to view it, even if it isn't in HD.
Unfortunately, this was typical of the Spanish authorities at the time, and for some time following. If the aircraft involved in the incident was not Spanish, then it was automatically the fault of the flight crew or crews, as they tried to do with the Tenerife air disaster, also at Los Rodeos. For one thing, based on the emotional state the air traffic controller was undoubtedly in having just learned his mother was dying of terminal cancer, he was clearly not in a suitable mental condition to be working, let alone at a time when Los Rodeos was having one of its all-to-common technical failures. To perform his role effectively under those conditions and in view of the meteorological conditions, he needed to be able to maintain a three-dimensional picture of ALL the aircraft in his area, which he clearly absolutely failed to do, thus letting the 727 get too close to Iberia prop forcing him to put the Dan Air 727 into the improper holding pattern. To compound this, he then issued an effective order to the Dan Air crew to assume a flight path that was taking the aircraft into hazardous terrain at an instructed altitude massively below the minimum safe altitude. Pretty much from the time they began their descent the Dan Air crew would have had no visual clues to their position and their relationship to the mountains so they were utterly reliant on air traffic control and what information was available on their instruments to keep the aircraft out of trouble as they were being directed to fly an unapproved and very unsafe course which they would have no familiarity or "feel" for. Nonetheless, the experienced pilot had enough knowledge to realise that something was very wrong, but sadly too late to save the aircraft, though only barely. In the years since this has happened the way that pilots can interact with air traffic control have been considerably altered, so now a pilot can query instructions from ATC that they have concerns about, but back when the pilot of the accident aircraft was trained ATC's word was second only to God's, and you could potentially get you log book blotted if you questioned or disagreed with ATC without having a damn good reason to, a situation that remained in commercial aviation in many countries for a considerable time after this event. The pilots followed the instructions given to them, incorrectly, by a stressed air traffic controller who didn't have his mind on his job, and he flew the plane into a mountain. I certainly disagree that spatial disorientation for the pilots can really be argued as a cause as the pilots retained enough spatial orientation, even in unfamiliar terrain, to have at least started to recover the aircraft from the situation it was put in by going full power on, climb and initiate a right turn which their spatial awareness indicated was taking them away from an inevitable crash. Sadly, they failed by a few seconds and not very many feet, impacting the terrain not far from the crest of the terrain over which a considerable amount of wreckage subsequently travelled. This was absolutely and unequivocally the directly entire fault of the air traffic controller, and indirectly the fault of the Spanish government in continuing to allow the commercial use of Los Rodeos airport long past the stage where it had become demonstrably unsuitable for the level and type of traffic it was expected to take...
Interesting comment. The strange thing is that the new airport on the south of Tenerife had already opened at the time of this crash. Maybe it was full up with other flights.
God almighty, if it is this easy to make such huge catastrophic mistakes, I will never EVER be able to rest easy in my cabin seat again. I don't care how often they repeat it back. 'Turn' instead of 'turns'?
This occurred in 1980. There have been numerous avionics improvements since then (eg Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System) etc. Not to mention the terrain alerting systems operating at controller workstations. Terrain avoidance and situational awareness is now heavily integrated into crew resource management and forms an important part of the descent and departure briefings conducted on the flight deck. You’re in safe hands.
GPS exists now. That makes flying a lot safer. It doesn't matter how foggy it is, the plane still knows where it is.
passenger*
It was largely the fault of the crew, compounded slightly by ground control. Simply questioning the orders would have prevented the crash. There is denial on both sides which is inevitable. It seems very primitive that there were no real navigation aids which again would have allowed errors to have been corrected. Being confused and picking at the meaning of an ambiguous order wasn't good enough. Simply asking for a repeat would have saved the plane.
I disagree. It was mostly the fault of the ground control in my opinion, although about 10% to 20% of the fault was also with the crew.
Can't for the life of me see how the Spanish came be blamed for this - despite the rhetoric of the bloke from the Airline Pilots Association. The pilot had apparently flown to Tenerife 50 times - surely he knows there a fkkin big mountain called Teide on the island........so WHY fly towards it?
You have to remember, this is a 727 in 1980! There’s no GPS, no moving map, no terrain display. Just VOR, NDB and possibly DME. In IMC, after following an ambiguous ATC instruction, it would have been very easy to lose situational awareness.
@@MartinNeep The captain knew the position of the second radio beacon, and he knew the direction from which he was approaching it. Even flying blind he had to know that to his right was the ocean and to the left mountains. It makes no sense to then follow an instruction to "turn left." What kind of instruction is that anyway? Just turn left? How much to the left? 15°, 45°, 90°? It mystifies me as to why he wouldn't have asked for clarification of the ATC instruction.
Because it was a foggy day.
@@reshpeck He thought he was slightly to the north of where he was.
Also it wasnt Teide itself but La Esperanza