Please stop the crap
Ray,
Thanks for backing me up there. For some reason everybody involved with KLM is overreacting every single time you think of posting even the mlldest of criticism. Is it because they know it's true?
Clearly this Otterman fellow has absolutely no idea what is going on in aviation. Furthermore those few 'free market' pilots certainly have had a really hard career working with so much ignorance in the left seat when they were hired. Thinking that a pilot that joins KLM with 150 real flight hours has the same standard, let alone better, than a 'free market' pilot with 6.000 is rubbish of course. But, for the record, the word according former civil flight school blokes, still is that KLM flight ops went down hill after KLM allowed those so called free market pilots in. Who said there's no arrogance there?
What this has to do with taking off from a taxiway?
Well, just about everything. As I posted above. OVERCONFIDENCE KILLS!
What I really would like to know what other foreign pilots think of Amsterdam airport. It wouldn't surprise me if all those superfluous and unnecessary procedures that AMS ATC comes up with contributed to this accident. What about the long list of NOTAMS for the airport? And the subtile changes in the printed material in 'aerodrome information'?
But in the end it's still the skipper that bears the burden of not taking off without a clearance. For those who say this has nothing to do with Tenerife: you are all wrong. This has everything to do with Tenerife as far as taking off without a clearance. This crew only had a clearance to take off from 36C, not from any other surface on the airport. Period.
Maybe technical, and far too early to state there was too large a authority gradient on the flight deck like 'Tenerife', but the lack of clearance is essential.
Cheers,
SM