@ampan - Captain Van Zanten did not have clearance to take off and overruled an obviously hesitant crew to send his 747 down the Los Rodeos runway - he was improvising procedure due to a pre-existing emergency (the bomb at Las Palmas airport). Captain Collins had been given a set of information that the airline changed overnight without informing him, which he followed dutifully and with the consent of his crew, and when things didn't look right he began an escape maneouvre at the first sign of disquiet. The cases couldn't be more different.
The disaster that bears the most similarities to TE901 on Erebus to my mind is non aviation-related, and it is the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. In both cases, information that might have prevented a catastrophe was known by those further up the chain from the men at the controls, but that information was withheld for the sake of expediency - and in both cases the powers that be attempted to blame the disaster on the last link in the chain. The only reason this information is known is due to the work of Gordon Vette and Peter Mahon in the case of Erebus, and the last recorded testament of Valery Legasov - the First Deputy Director of the Soviet Institute of Atomic Energy - in the case of Chernobyl.
Last edited by DozyWannabe; 1st Jan 2012 at 20:22.