Tenerife airport disaster (1977)
Two Boeing 747s—KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736—collided on a foggy runway at Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife, Canary Islands. The KLM captain began his takeoff roll while the Pan Am jet was still on the runway. All 248 people aboard the KLM plane and 335 of 396 aboard the Pan Am plane were killed—583 dead, making it the deadliest accident in aviation history.
International aviation authorities overhauled radio communication standards. The word 'takeoff' was banned from all ATC communications except the actual takeoff clearance itself.
The disaster became the foundational case for Crew Resource Management training, which teaches flight crews to challenge authority and communicate assertively. It also drove investment in airport surface detection radar.
Tenerife showed that miscommunication between a controller and a vehicle on a runway can be catastrophic. Nearly 50 years later, the LaGuardia collision demonstrates that the same fundamental vulnerability—a controller losing track of who is on the runway—persists despite decades of procedural reform.