MGifos :
I believe that the time pressure perceived by Van Zanten was increased because of the quickly deteriorating visibility. While he may have had sufficient time to get to Las Palmas, the fog was quickly becoming too thick to take off. The conditions were marginal and getting worse
Wrong assumption, anybody who has been in TFN ( and van Zanten had been there before) knows that the " fog" is in fact a Cu or St passing "on" the runway ( Normal TFN ATIS in that case are something like cloud 7/8 at zero meter, 1/8 at 30 m ) .
When they started to taxi the RVR was 2-3 Km.(at 16:50 ) The local wx reports gave close to the time of collision (17:02 ): RVR 300m In fact 4 minutes after the collision the RVR was more than 5 Km. ( 17:10 RVR : 4-5 Km intermittent 7 Km )
Rockhound :
Stewart states that when van Zanten answered F/E Schreuder's query with an emphatic "Yes", the F/O also answered simultaneously in the affirmative. I can't verify this because I don't have the accident reports and transcripts in front of me but I'll check them.
I cannot find a record to this . In the official Spanish CVR/FDR transcript ( a rare roneocopy of the original from 1978 which I have in front of me ) the "Ja well " only comes from C1 . the quieries about Pan Am all comes from C3 ( F/E), the only thing that ever comes from C2 is "V1"