Originally Posted by
Lyman
You know Tenerife? There was NO crisis, NO pressure.
Oh, but for the KLM Captain there certainly was. It might not have mattered much in the grand scheme of things (certainly not worth risking 500 lives over), but from the point of view of a management captain, he was facing a dilemma.
Firstly there was the new working time regulations - if exceeded, the whole flight crew would have faced a disciplinary and - if the letter of the law held - likely have been stripped of their licences and faced the consequent end of their careers.
Secondly, the other option would have been to stop in Las Palmas (or Tenerife) overnight. This would have avoided the regulatory risk, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands - if not a million - dollars in passenger and crew accomodation costs, plus parking fees for their 747 and potential legal action from the inconvenienced passengers with the wherewithal to do so.
The first was a career risk in terms of his standing as a pilot, and the second was a career risk from a management standpoint. Either way, the odds were that he'd lose some standing at best, or his entire career at worst.
So he devises a third option - one that cannot be allowed to fail. He takes on enough fuel to make a whistlestop at Las Palmas and then push straight back to Schiphol as fast as they can go. The rest is history.
To most people, his actions make no sense at all - but for whatever reason he believed it was the right thing to do, and the knowledge underpinning that belief died with him.