It was 40 years ago today
 

I was a kid and used to live in another continent but I remember when it happened.

Years had pass and I made quite a few flights into GCXO as captain and I always wondered why they haven´t change the rwy location signs for ones bigger and with illumination until no so long ago, when they also change the names from C to E.

And that´s all I have to say about that......

What are you talking about?

At a guess, given his location and the date - Tenerife.

An element of holes lining up (bomb threat, busy airport, back-track, fog etc) but ultimately a very impatient KLM captain - Veldhuyzen van Zanten - was the cause of this horrific accident.

You can tell from the CVR transcript that the KLM Co and Eng both had doubts about the runway being clear! The PanAm guys saw him bearing down on them about 10 sec before impact, but because they were taxiing so slowly (looking for their turn-off) they couldn't get out of the way in time. What a dreadful waste of life!

On that terrible day, I was passing through KLM ops who were our handling agents. The tears of the crews on that day have always been with me. Life can be coincidental in that I eventually married an ex Pan-Am flight attendant who lost friends on that day too.
For the rest of my career I never hurried in limited visability & if slots were tight I tended to slow down & made sure nothing was missed.

Some of those pictures were taken by a passenger on the KLM 747, who was eventually killed that day:

40 years since Tenerife - Airliners.net

Pretty haunting.

There is an excellent article on the disaster here:

The true story behind the deadliest air disaster of all time

Blimey I must be getting old was it really 40 years since the Tenerife airport disaster.
The Tenerife airport disaster was a fatal runway collision between two charter Jumbo Boeing 747's of Pan Am named Clipper Victor and KLM's The Rhine on Sunday March 27 1977 at Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife, one of the Canary islands.
The crash killed 583 people, making it the deadliest accident in aviation history. (and it was on the ground)
Robina van Lanschot, who was with the Dutch tour company who had chartered the KLM flight, decided she had seen her passengers through to the Canaries and decided to call it a day and stay overnight with her boyfriend in nearby Santa Cruz. This decision certainly saved her life. She tried to persuade her two best friends to get off at Tenerife too, but they would not.

I've not seen this highlighted anywhere on the forums so thought it should be noted:

Bob Bragg, the First Officer on the PanAm aircraft, passed away in Feburary this year. I believe he worked up front for many years after the Tenerife accident, retiring with 30,000+ hours.

Peace to him and the hundred's of victims of this accident on this 40th anniversary.