Originally Posted by thePassenger
I can´t remember the details and have no way to look them up at the moment - but weren´t there some rumours that they watched a soccer-game in the tower?
It was a theory put forward by the Dutch (KLM) investigation team, who were understandably perturbed at the apparent actions of their training captain. They claimed they heard the Spanish word for "soccer" in the background on the ATC tapes, something that was not corroborated by either the American or Spanish teams. No evidence has ever been put forward to support the claim.
The sad fact about that accident it that it was the ultimate "Swiss-cheese"-type incident. *If* Los Rodeos was equipped properly for 747 operations, *if* they had more than one radio channel, *if* Van Zanten had decided to refuel at Las Palmasin instead, *if* he had parked his aircraft 12 feet to the left of where it was, *if* the PanAm crew had attempted the acute turn on to the third taxiway exit and finally *if* the Canary Island separatists had not bombed Las Palmas airport in the first place, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
As for the other incidents, if you have an engine fire in flight, you shut the thing down. All the BM crew did was follow their training - the fact that the training was no longer relevent on the new aircraft was not their fault.
There are only 2 cockpit crew on a 757 - it was nearly midnight and the only reference they had was their instruments. If (as was the case) their instruments were giving erroneous readings then it's very easy to get the aircraft into an unrecoverable attitude, no matter how good you are.
The Staines incident led to a near-revolution in safety procedures, including mandatory CVRs and the advent of CRM. To pull that up as relevent to today's safety culture is erroneous to say the very least.
[EDIT : A lot of lessons were learned in the early '70s - a lot of systems design was re-evaluated in the light of Eastern 401 too. (In that case, the autopilot could show as engaged on one side of the cockpit when in fact the opposite column had disengaged it, and the audible warning for "leaving assigned altitude" was too quiet)]
Referring back to the original topic, the 744 has buckets of power in reserve compared to the 747 Classic even before you start comparing to ETOPS. The IHT was just engaging in a bit of old-fashioned muckracking and US exceptionalism.