This is a picture of a busy street in Taipei, just down from our hotel. It can be clicked on for more photos of my time in Taiwan. My first flight was down to Singapore and back, then the next day, I flew up to Taiwan and back. We only had a few short moments in Singapore, and when I stepped outside to take a few photos of the plane, my lens fogged up, and that was it — no photos. The next day, we had a seven hour layover in Taipei before we headed back to Hong Kong, so the company got us a hotel room. I used my time at the hotel to go exploring.

Just as an aside note, my little bit of extra money that I spent on my Nikon D40, instead of a cheap, worthless point and shoot has become worth it with the memories I’m able to capture. Sure, a little fancier camera will cost a bit more, but that money is paid back ten fold by being able to record memories that will then last a lifetime. Point and shoots just don’t have the capabilities to shoot in low light or have a large zoom range, that can make the difference in getting the shot or not. I want the shot. I want to remember the adventures I’ve embarked on, and so I’m glad I have my D40. If you are going on a trip where memories will be made, do yourself a favor and buy something that will actually do a good job recording the memories!

So, my first flight was to do a roundtrip from Hong Kong to Singapore. I was very nervous about what to expect and didn’t have any idea what that day would be like. Cathay puts a safety pilot in the cockpit with trainee copilots (me) for the first eight sectors (flights), just in case there is trouble on landings or whatever. My safety pilot was named Claudio and was really nice. The captain was even nicer, Martin Laver. He called me the night before and talked about what to expect. He chuckled and said to relax, don’t do any more studying and don’t worry about anything. He said that the first few flights are just to get oriented, so put the books away and enjoy yourself. Then he said, “So tonight, relax. If you drink, go for a drink. If you don’t drink, don’t start.” We both laughed out loud on that one.

The next morning, we passed through Cathay’s own security station in operations and got on a bus that took us directly to the plane we were to take to Singapore and back. Martin flew the first leg and I was the PM (Pilot monitoring), who works the radios, does the paperwork, and assists the PF (Pilot flying). As we pushed back from the gate and taxied out, it was surreal. I just couldn’t get my mind around the fact that we were a 747 with nearly 200 passengers (not nearly full) and were going to make a voyage to Singapore.

Once over the South China Sea, we passed off the coast of Danang, Vietnam and I told the crew that my dad had spent some time there in the late sixties. They knew that meant the Vietnam War. It was a smooth and uneventful flight and Martin and I discussed some training topics as we passed the time.

Working the radios was a different story. As an American and used to talking on the radio to American air traffic control, this was my first indoctrination of what foreign accents and poor radios sound like. Many poor countries in South Asia are run by military dictatorships, who take all the country’s money and put it into worthless things, like militaries and weapons, which leaves very little for radar and air traffic control services that are used by the airlines passing through that country’s airspace. Combine poor English, with poor radar coverage, with a radio that probably costs less than a new MacBook from Apple, with me, who is new to all of this, and you get a very confused pilot. Martin helped me out a few times and I was glad he was there because sometimes I had no clue what had just been said. Sometimes, I think the Cathay pilots just know what to expect as far as clearances on the radio, and that helps them “hear” the clearance.

When we landed at Singapore’s Changi airport, we had a short taxi to the gate. As the passengers deplaned, we worked on all the after flight routines and took care of paperwork. It was then that I could catch my breath and take it all in. I realized that I was farther from home than I’d ever been before since I left for Hong Kong. Currently, the longest flight in the world is operated by Singapore Airlines, with their amazing A340-500 that runs direct to New York. It’s in the neighborhood of 9,500 miles away. The second longest flight currently is also out of Singapore — to LAX. It skips just to the other side of the north pole that the JFK flight takes. JFK to Hong Kong is fifth longest and shorter than SIN-JFK because Hong Kong is farther north than Singapore. As all these flights head up over the north pole in what is called a great circle route, the farther south the departure airport is, the longer the flight will be.

I didn’t have much time to miss the family because then it was time to get going again. It was now my turn to fly, and that means that I also taxi the aircraft out for takeoff, too. Driving that beast around is amazing. We sit over 30 feet in the air, so the biggest issue is judging the taxi speed and making accurate turns around the corners. The taxi and takeoff were uneventful and once up at cruise, Martin and I once again discussed operational issues. Coming back into Hong Kong would be my first landing at night, and as I suspected, that proved to be a little bit of trouble. The landing was, shall we say, firm.

There are large stripes on the runway that serve as aiming points for touchdown, and the perfect touchdown would have the wheels touch down right on them. As we came in for landing, I was aiming for them, but because I am now in such a large plane, the out-the-window picture is so much different than what I am used to from my previous experience, I miss judged it a bit. The landing gear are 100 feet behind the cockpit, and because the airplane approaches the landing with about 3 degrees nose up, the landing gear are much lower than the front of the plane. As I was looking at the aiming points, we hit hard, with those blasted aim points still in front of us out the window — whoops! It wasn’t terrible, but much worse than I had done in my base training. Oh well, there’s always next time, right?

Martin and Claudio had a good chuckle about it, but it was no big deal. I taxied in and parked us on the gate. That is also a fun part of the flight. The airplanes are guided in with a radio wave guidance system. It detects the type of plane we are as we turn into the gate area and will show on a large screen: 747. We have to verify that it does indeed read the right plane, or it will give us incorrect guidance to park at the gate. It then shows us a visual representation of how to pull in straight to the gate. There is a vertical line that represents the yellow line we are taxing on up to the jetway. Below the vertical line is an arrow pointing up. When the arrow is directly below the vertical line, we are right on track. When the arrow slides to the right of the vertical line, we are off to the right and have to make a small correction to the left. The whole system is very accurate, and it can be a little frustrating when you move just a few inches off and it starts telling you to turn the other way. Finally, it reads off how many meters are left until we need to stop, and below 3 meters, it counts down in tenths of meters, until a large STOP is shown. Following that guidance correctly puts us right on the yellow line and the mark where we need to stop.

Once parked, we did all our after flight duties and debriefed the flight and we talked about how we thought it went. Overall, he said I did a good job, and I was just glad to try and keep up with him. Sometimes I felt like I was so far behind, that if we crashed, I wouldn’t have been hurt because I would have been about 100 miles back.

With the first flight complete, it felt really great. Things were making sense and I was looking forward to going to Taipei in the morning.

The next day, Martin and I had a different safety pilot, Brendan, but everything proceeded roughly the same. This time, I was going to fly both sectors — to Taipei and back. The flight up to Taipei was only a little more than an hour, so things were not as relaxed as Singapore, but we managed to get everything accomplished that we needed to. This landing, in the daylight, was much better than yesterday’s and my confidence was starting to improve.

We were going to land and have about seven hours before we left again. So we got a day room in a hotel to rest and pass the time away. Martin and Brendan took naps, but I was going to explore a little of the city. The hotel was okay, but it wasn’t in the best part of town. Taipei is a pretty area, but there are factories and industrialization everywhere. The part of town we were in was far from downtown, so there was not much English written or spoken and there was not the huge buildings and city feel that Hong Kong gives.

None of the signs along the streets were in English, and people I came across could not speak a lick of it. There were not too many sidewalks where I walked, and I almost got taken out several times by mopeds and motorcycles whizzing by me. Many of the cars parked on the streets had their driver side mirrors pulled in so as to not have them swiped off by passing cars and scooters. I walked about 45 minutes from the hotel in one direction looking around and scouting out a place to eat. I then turned around and headed back to the hotel to then headed about 30 minutes in the other direction.

It was then that I came across an outdoor market like so many in Hong Kong. I bought some fresh fruit and then saw a McDonalds and headed for it. I hate to eat fast food all the time, but in this part of town, it looked like the safest bet. Even in the McDonalds, I had to point to the things on the menu that I wanted, because English was out and gibberish was in. “May I have some BBQ sauce?” “Forget it, never mind.” After dinner and on the way back to the hotel, I stopped by a cart on the side of the road that was selling fresh doughnuts (and since I’m so skinny) I got myself one. Or was it two?

The flight back to Hong Kong went well but now it was evening and I was wondering how my night landing was going to fair. Approaching the runway, the winds were gusty and blowing in a cross wind (across the runway instead of down it) which is more of a challenge. I focused as hard as I could and managed to get us down quite smoothly and accurately, with the aiming markers passing out of sight this time before touching down. Ah, so I can learn! Both Martin and Brendan complimented this one and I felt a lot better about myself.

Flying this plane is amazing and even though it can be challenging, I know I can do it. It’s just a matter of gaining experience and practice to make everything line up just right. So as the flying part comes along, it’s now time to focus more on the head knowledge that has to accompany the flying skills. I’ll have to work on that next time. Now, it’s off to Bangkok, Mumbai, and Dubai and back again.

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I got to fly the 747-400 today for the first time and it was amazing! All the training up to this point has been to prepare me for today, the meat and potatoes of a pilot’s job: Flying the plane. It was stressful, and as I started to fly, the cockpit seemed to get pretty warm, but I was also able to relax and have fun with it too. We’ve often been told that this is the most fun we’ll have during training, so I tried to enjoy it as much as I could.

The -400 is the fourth generation of 747 and currently is the newest iteration until the -8 arrives. It will eclipse the -400 as the newest and best, but at 20 years old, the -400, as good as it is, can certainly be updated in both electronics and fuel consumption. I believe that Cathay will be one of the first operators of the new -8 (Cargolux is the first).

Captain Paul Barton helped to guide me through the skies today. We took off out of Hong Kong and headed to Zhuhai, China, about 50 miles away. It is ideal for practicing touch and go’s because of it’s long runway and its light volume of traffic. We only had to avoid two other planes the whole time we were there.

Also aboard was Obet Mazinyi, a captain transitioning from the older -200 version of the 747, and Claudius Van Heyningen. Obet started us off by flying over to Zhuhai and I brought us back to Hong Kong. Obet only needed three landings because he was already qualified in the 747. I needed six landing as a new pilot on the 747. Finally, Claudius was there as a safety pilot, to help Paul run the checklists and and keep an eye on things. We flew B-HUI, a passenger aircraft for Cathay Pacific.

Our plane was a few minutes late from coming in from LAX, so we all four chatted as we waited for it to arrive. Once it was in the gate, it took a long time for everyone to get off (and there were 10 wheelchair assists!) Once in the cockpit, one of the members of the last crew had typed “Good Luck” into one of the navigational computers so that we’d see it. Obet got the cockpit setup while Paul showed me around the preflight of the instruments and cockpit. Claudius did the walk around and started the coffee for us — how cool!

Everything was uneventful and after Obet’s three landings, it was my turn. We stopped on the taxiway and I climbed up into the seat. Wow! I was sitting thirty feet off the ground and at the controls of a beast. In the 747, unlike a lot of planes, there are steering tillers on both sides of the cockpit. So, if it is the copilot’s turn to fly, he taxis as well. There is a groundspeed readout on one of our instruments, and we have to use that to tell how fast we are actually going because we sit so high up. Without looking at the speed, one might be going 60 before they realized they were taxiing too fast. It’s all about perspective.

I taxied down to the end of the runway, and Paul did the first takeoff and landing so I could see things from up front, and then it was my turn. All four Rolls Royce engines rumbled to life and we sped down the runway. “Rotate” was Paul’s call, and I pitched the nose up to 12.5 degrees, and we were off! All in all, I feel like I did pretty well. The training in the sim is helpful, but nothing can prepare you for landing the real airplane. Small corrections, easy on the controls, and then listen for the callouts. The computer will call “50, 40, 30, 20, 10” As in feet off the ground as you come into land. As a matter of fact, when sitting on the ground, the radio altimeter (which shows us how high we are off the ground below us) shows -8 feet. That’s because it’s set to read zero when the wheels first touch down. The whole landing gear are so massive and huge, that they and the struts compress a full 8 feet from touchdown to full weight on wheels. Amazing.

At “30” we are easing the yoke back to flair above the runway. At “20” we ease the power back to idle by “10” and then wait for the wheels to start rolling. It was beautiful and I wish all my readers could have been there with me. I gave my camera to Obet and he took a few photos. I’m sweating in most, and looking cheesy in others, but I’m glad to have a record of today because it was a monumental day. After returning to Hong Kong, I taxied us into a stand and we had some free meals on the plane: heated meat pies (chicken pot pies) cheese, coffee, milk, water, fruit, whatever we wanted. I ate a lot to save on lunch money later! Then, the van came by to pick us up to take us back to the terminal.

I can still remember my first landing, all by myself, in Marion, Indiana. Steve Manganello was my instructor, and with a hand-held radio by the side of the runway, he watched as I did my first solo flight in a Cessna 172. Now, some 14 years later, almost to the day, I’m reliving my dream of being an airline pilot. All those years of wanting to fly a 747, all that time growing up in Indonesia and riding on 747’s and wanting to be up front, all the heartache to get here to Cathay now all seems worth it and I can finally stop dreaming and start flying.

The training ahead will be very tough as there will be much expected of me, but for now, I can revel in the glory of having said that I’ve flown a 747. And what a moment it was, indeed.

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These last few weeks I’ve been feeling down. Three weeks ago, things were looking up: I had just finished two very hard simulator checkrides, and all I had left to do was a base training exercise and I would then have the following two weeks off. Those two weeks would be spent at home, relaxing and recouping from all the stress from training.

Base training is really a non-event. After all the simulations I had been through, it certainly wasn’t as stressful as the checkrides I had done well in. Base training is where we take the airplane up and do touch and go’s — take off, come back around and land, and then instead of stopping after the landing, we push the power back up and take off again, hence the term touch and go. We do that in the real plane, but to get ready for that experience, we practice it in the simulator first.

I may have overlooked this sim session because I ended up not doing well in it. Flying big airplanes like the 747 are flown much differently than the smaller planes that I was used to, like the EMB-145. The 747 is so big and massive, that any deviations from the flight path have to be noticed and corrected almost immediately, because of this annoying thing called inertia. Once the airplane is significantly headed off course, it takes a lot of work to get it back to where it should be. Those corrections have to take place much more quickly than in smaller planes, where a little “slop” can be gotten away with.

The base training is also flown without any flight guidance, or “raw data” where there are no pointers on the instruments to show us where to go or if we are getting off course. All the course corrections must be seen by ourselves, and we can’t run home to mama with the flight directors giving us flight guidance. At my last job, I prided myself in not using the flight directors, so that I could fly by my instruments without any guidance help. But, transferring that skill to the 747 has proven to be quite tricky, indeed.

In the simulator, I got stressed as things didn’t fly the way I wanted them to, and then I started flying poorly, which led to more nervousness, which led to worse flying, and so forth. Needless to say, I didn’t pass that portion of the base training. Bummer! I was then scheduled to go on leave (vacation to all you Americans reading this) and I didn’t have this sim session out of the way. They gave me another chance in the sim, but it would be after I returned from Ohio. 

I was upset because I wanted this session out of the way and behind me. I didn’t want that poor performance hanging over my head. I wanted to relax while on leave, but instead, all I could think about was trying to be better the next time. Flying is tricky because like in my case, I could mentally know everything, and how to fly the 747 correctly, but getting it to pass through to my hands and feet was a different story. Flying isn’t like a test, where you can cram knowledge in and pass, it is performanced-based, and you can either have a good day or a bad day in the sim.

As I headed back to Hong Kong after my leave, with this sim evaluation looming over my head, my dad gave me some great words of wisdom. He quoted Matthew 28:20, “And surely I will be with you always, even to the end of the world.” Jesus is talking to His disciples and this is the last thing He says to them before he ascends back into heaven. Those disciples were later beaten, decapitated, and even hung on a cross upside down. They all died for their belief in Jesus. (As an aside note, that is a great reason to believe that the Bible is true — because what they wrote about in the new testament is what got them killed, and people don’t die for a lie, they die for the truth!) So even as those men suffered great trials, God was with them. And even little old me, who travelled to Hong Kong on the other side of the earth, God was still going to be with me!

I also read II Corinthians 1:3-11 as I headed back to this side of the world, with potential trouble looming:

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles . . .
We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.”

That short section was quite an inspiration to me, especially as the parts that I put in bold seemed to jump out at me. Isn’t it just like God, that when your heart is troubled, you can turn to His unfailing word and find peace and encouragement? That is why I feel His word is eternal. It isn’t just a book of old stories that no longer have meaning, but they are words that are full of power!

Needless to say, with the prayer support of many, and my confidence fully resting on God, I was able to stay calm and do exceptionally well on my checkride. Now I will get to fly the real plane and do the touch and go’s that sound so exciting.

I used to tell people that God would not put them in a situation beyond what they could bear. But that is a complete falsehood. That is no where in the Bible! In reality, God puts us in situations like that a lot, where all we can do is trust in Him and lean on Him, and look to Him for direction and guidance. He does that to stretch us and help us grow. Whether it be promising Abraham a son when that was no longer physically possible, or putting a Red Sea in front of Moses and an Egyptian army behind him, or sending Gideon out to conquer an army with only 300 men (the real “300” movie) or using the impossible strength of Samson to kill God’s enemy, or raising men from the dead, God uses the impossible and makes it possible. When we humble ourselves, and become poor in spirit, He loves nothing more than to rush in and save us, sometimes in the most impossible ways.

God sure helped me turn things around because He is always faithful to those who love Him. Even if I had bombed this training and been fired and sent home, He would be guiding and leading and I would have to call it a privilege to follow him, “to the very end of the world.”

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On the 7th anniversary of 9/11, I was in Hong Kong today doing an observation flight to Manila and back. An observation flight is one where I just sit in the cockpit jumpseat and observe what is going on and learn from it.

Captain Terry Hodge was giving instruction to a new copilot Steeve Michielsen (who is Belgian) and my sim partner Chris Rollins and I watched from the two jumpseats. It was quite an impressive day to be up front on this passenger plane and see how my training is supposed to culminate — with me eventually being in Steeve’s seat as a copilot. 

It was also fun to climb the stairs from the main deck to get up to the cockpit! The main landing gear are 100 feet behind the cockpit when they touch down for landing, so the view from the front windows is quite different from what I am used to. It was good to see how things flowed and it really helped to bring things together in my mind. I pretty much knew what was coming next and a lot of my training in the sim made a lot more sense. This is why pilots have observation flights at many airlines.

The weather was great and Captain Hodge set a very relaxed and positive atmosphere, where we felt free to ask questions and learn from his experience. Overall, it was good to get out of the hotel and see some of the real world stuff that goes on at this airline. In operations, connected to our hotel, we passed through our own security there, then out to a bus that took us straight to our plane! I walked around the aircraft with the captain, while Chris stayed up with Steeve as they set up the cockpit for departure. 

The round trip to Manila was uneventful and just an absolute blast. I hope to finish my training strong and get into that cockpit as soon as I can because even if it becomes a stressful ride, it will still be amazing!

This is just a quick note to any readers here that I am still alive, but I haven’t done much blogging due to the busy and stressful schedule of the training. When I get my head above water, I will again post about my training. Priority number one is to get passed all my assessments.

I wasn’t able to complete one section of my simulator training and will have to revisit that later on this month. I’ll feel better about all my training and have more time for blogging once that is all passed. Thanks for your prayers and patience,

Toby

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“Tenerife”
By Patrick Smith

April 6, 2007 | March 27 marked the 30th anniversary of the most deadly aviation disaster in history.

Most people haven’t heard of Tenerife, a pan-shaped speck in the Atlantic. It’s one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic chain governed by the Spanish, clustered a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco. The big town on Tenerife is Santa Cruz, and its airport, beneath a set of cascading hillsides, is called Los Rodeos. There, on March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747s — one belonging to KLM, the other to Pan Am — collided on a foggy runway. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed. The KLM jet had commenced takeoff without permission, slamming broadside into the taxiing Pan Am jumbo as it swerved to avoid impact.

The magnitude of the catastrophe speaks for itself, but what makes it particularly unforgettable is the startling set of ironies and coincidences that preceded it. Indeed, most airplane crashes result not from a single error or failure, but from a chain of improbable errors and failures, together with a stroke or two of really bad luck. Never was this illustrated more calamitously, and almost to the point of absurdity, than on that Sunday afternoon three decades ago.

Imagine we’re there: In 1977, in only its eighth year of service, the 747 is already the biggest, most influential, and possibly the most glamorous commercial jetliner ever built. For just these reasons, it’s hard not to imagine what a story it would be — and how much carnage might result — should two of these behemoths ever hit each other. Really, though, what are the chances of that? A Hollywood script if ever there was one.

Both of the Tenerife 747s are charters. Pan Am has come from Los Angeles, with a stopover in New York; KLM from its home base in Amsterdam, Netherlands. As it happens, neither is supposed to be on Tenerife in the first place. They are scheduled to land at Las Palmas, on the nearby island of Grand Canary, where many of the passengers are on their way to meet cruise ships. After a bomb planted by Canary Island separatists explodes in the Las Palmas airport flower shop, they divert temporarily to Los Rodeos, along with several other flights, arriving around 2 p.m.

The Pan Am aircraft, registered N736PA, is no stranger to notoriety. In January 1970, this very same plane completed the inaugural commercial voyage of a 747, between New York’s Kennedy airport and London-Heathrow. Somewhere on its nose, maybe, is the dent from a champagne bottle. White with a blue window stripe, it wears the name Clipper Victor in frilly writing along the forward fuselage. The KLM 747, also blue and white, is named the Rhine.

Let’s not forget the airlines themselves: Pan Am, arguably the most storied franchise in the history of aviation, requires little introduction. KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines), for its part, is the oldest continuously operating airline in the world, founded in 1919 and highly regarded for its safety and punctuality.

The KLM captain, Jacob van Zanten, whose errant takeoff roll will soon kill nearly 600 people, including him and all 247 others on his plane, is the airline’s top 747 instructor pilot and a KLM celebrity. Passengers may recognize him in the concourse, or descending the spiral staircase of the 747’s first-class cabin. His confident visage stares out from KLM’s magazine ads. Later, when KLM executives first get word of the crash, they will attempt to contact van Zanten in hopes of sending him to Tenerife to aid the investigation team.

The normally lazy Los Rodeos is packed with diversions. The Rhine and Clipper Victor sit adjacent to each other at the southeast corner of the apron, their wingtips almost touching. Finally, at around 4 o’clock, Las Palmas begins accepting traffic again. (Imagine, today, the idea of an airport reopening within a few hours of a terrorist bombing.) Pan Am is quickly ready for departure, but the lack of room and the angle at which the jets face each other requires that KLM leave first.

The weather is fine until just before the accident, and if not for KLM requesting extra fuel at the last minute, both would be on their way sooner. During the delay, a heavy blanket of fog swoops down from the hills and envelops the airport. (That fuel also meant extra weight, affecting how quickly the 747 would, or would not, become airborne. For reasons you’ll see in a moment, that would be critical.)

Because of the tarmac congestion, the normal route to runway 30 is blocked. Departing planes will need to taxi down on the runway itself. Reaching the end, they’ll make a 180-degree turn before taking off in the opposite direction. This procedure, rare at commercial airports, is called a “back-taxi.” At Tenerife in ’77, it will put two 747s on the same runway at the same time, invisible not only to each other but to the control tower as well. The airport has no ground tracking radar.

KLM taxis ahead and onto the runway, with the Pan Am Clipper ambling several hundred yards behind. Capt. van Zanten will steer to the end, turn around, then hold until authorized for takeoff. Pan Am’s instructions are to turn clear along a left-side taxiway in order to allow the other plane’s departure. Once off the runway, they will report so to the tower.

Unable to differentiate the taxiways in the low visibility, the Pan Am pilots miss their assigned turnoff. Continuing to the next one is no big problem, but now they’re on the runway for several additional seconds.
Having wheeled into position at the end, van Zanten comes to a stop. His first officer, Klaas Meurs, takes the radio and receives the air traffic control route clearance. This is not a takeoff clearance, but rather a procedure outlining turns, altitudes and frequencies for use once airborne. Normally it is received well prior to an aircraft taking the runway, but the pilots have been too busy with checklists and taxi instructions until now. They are tired, annoyed and anxious to get going. The irritability in the pilots’ voices, van Zanten’s in particular, has been duly noted by the control tower and other pilots.

There are still a couple of dominoes yet to fall, but now the final act is in motion — literally. Because the route clearance comes where and when it does, it is mistaken for a takeoff clearance as well. First officer Meurs, sitting to van Zanten’s right, acknowledges the altitudes, headings and fixes, then finishes off with an unusual, somewhat hesitant phrase, backdropped by the sound of accelerating engines. “We are now, uh, at takeoff.”

Van Zanten releases the brakes. “We gaan,” he is heard saying on the cockpit voice recorder. “Let’s go.” And with that, his mammoth machine begins barreling down the fog-shrouded runway, completely without permission.

“At takeoff” is not standard phraseology among pilots. But it’s explicit enough to grab the attention of the Pan Am crew and the control tower. It’s hard for either party to believe KLM is actually moving, but both reach for their microphones to make sure.

“And we’re still taxiing down the runway,” relays Bob Bragg, the Pan Am first officer.

At the same instant, the tower radios a message to KLM. “OK,” says the controller. “Stand by for takeoff. I will call you.”

There is no reply, but the silence is taken as a tacit, if not exactly proper, acknowledgment.

Either of these transmissions would be, should be, enough to stop van Zanten cold in his tracks. He still has time to discontinue the roll. The problem is, because they occur simultaneously, they overlap.

Pilots and controllers communicate via two-way VHF radios. The process is similar to speaking over a walkie-talkie: A person activates a microphone, speaks, then releases the button and waits for an acknowledgment. It differs from using a telephone, for example, as only one party can speak at a time, and has no idea what his message actually sounds like over the air. If two or more microphones are clicked at the same instant, the transmissions cancel each other out, delivering a noisy occlusion of static or a high-pitched squeal called a “heterodyne.” Rarely are heterodynes dangerous. But at Tenerife, this is the last straw.

Van Zanten hears only the word “OK,” followed by a five-second squeal. He keeps going.

Ten seconds later there is one final exchange, clearly and maddeningly audible on the post-crash tapes. “Report when runway clear,” the tower says to Pan Am.

“We’ll report when we’re clear,” acknowledges Bob Bragg.

Focused on the takeoff, van Zanten and his first officer apparently miss this. But the second officer, sitting behind them, does not. Alarmed, with their plane now racing forward at a hundred knots, he leans forward. “Is he not clear?” he asks. “That Pan American?”

“Oh, yes,” Van Zanten answers emphatically.

In the Pan Am cockpit, nose-to-nose with the still unseen, rapidly approaching interloper, there’s a growing sense that something isn’t right. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Capt. Victor Grubbs says nervously.

A few moments later, the lights of the KLM 747 emerge out of the grayness, dead ahead, 2,000 feet away and closing fast.

“There he is!” cries Grubbs, shoving the thrust levers to full power. “Look at him! Goddam, that son of a bitch is coming!” He yanks the plane’s steering tiller, turning left as hard as he can, toward the grass at the edge of the runway.

“Get off! Get off! Get off!” shouts Bob Bragg.

Van Zanten sees them, but it’s too late. Attempting to leapfrog, he pulls back on the elevators, dragging his tail along the pavement for 70 feet in a hail of sparks. He almost makes it, but just as his plane breaks ground, its undercarriage and engines slice into the ceiling of the Clipper Victor, instantly demolishing its midsection and setting off a series of explosions.

Badly damaged, the Rhine settles back to the runway, skids hard on its belly for an additional thousand feet, and is consumed by fire before a single one of its 248 occupants can escape.

Remarkably, of 396 passengers and crew aboard the Pan Am jumbo, 61 survived, including all five people in the cockpit — the three-man crew and two off-duty employees riding in the jump seats. (Among the dead were Eve Meyer, ex-wife of the filmmaker Russ Meyer.)

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet two of those survivors, and to hear their stories firsthand. I say that nonchalantly, but this is probably the closest I’ve ever come to meeting, for lack of a better term, a hero. (OK, in June 1984, I played a star-struck game of Frisbee in a parking lot with Bob Mould, but that’s not the same.)

Romanticizing the fiery deaths of 583 people is akin to romanticizing war — something that always repulsed me — but there’s a certain mystique to the Tenerife disaster, a gravity so strong that shaking these survivors’ hands produced a feeling similar to that of a little kid meeting his favorite baseball player. These men were there, emerging from the wreckage of what, for some of us, was an event of mythic proportions.

I was introduced to Jack Rideout in New York in the summer of 2004, where I’d been invited for the taping of a National Geographic special. At Tenerife, Rideout had been sitting in coach with his girlfriend, who also made it out. After the impact, he helped save several others, pushing them through an emergency exit before jumping to safety. After his release from the hospital, a photograph of Rideout — bandaged, but without critical injuries — appeared in several newspapers.

Despite it all, Rideout would soon fly again, without serious fear. His business career continued to take him around the country and abroad.
The second survivor I met was Bob Bragg, the Pan Am first officer. I met him in Los Angeles last summer, on the set of a documentary being made for the Discovery Channel about the 30th anniversary of the accident.
It was Bragg who had uttered, “And we’re still taxiing down the runway” — seven easy words that should have saved the day, but instead were lost forever in the shriek and crackle of a blocked transmission. Just thinking about it gives me the chills, but there’s nothing dark about Bob Bragg — nothing that, on the surface, feels moored to the nightmare of ’77. He’s one of the most easygoing people you’ll ever meet. Gray-haired, bespectacled and articulate, he looks and sounds like what he is: a retired airline pilot.

God knows how many times he has recounted the collision to others. He speaks about the accident with a practiced ease, in a voice of modest detachment, as if he’d been a spectator watching from afar. Of course, the story needs no hyperbole to be terrifying. If anything, Bragg’s ungarnished narrative makes it even more so. As do the strange and astounding details that normally don’t make it into the interviews and TV shows. You can read all the transcripts, pore over the findings, watch the documentaries a hundred times over. Not until you sit with Bob Bragg and hear the unedited account do you get a full sense of what happened. The basic story is well known; it’s the ancillaries that make it moving — and surreal.

Bragg describes the initial impact as little more than “a bump and some shaking.” All five men in the cockpit, located at the forward end of the 747’s distinctive upper-deck hump, saw the KLM jet coming, and had ducked. Knowing they’d been hit, Bragg instinctively reached upward in an effort to pull the “fire handles” — a set of four overhead-mounted levers that cut off the supply of fuel, air, electricity and hydraulics running to and from the engines. His arm groped helplessly. When he looked up, the ceiling was gone.

Turning around, he realized that the entire upper deck had been sheared off at a point about two feet aft of his chair. He could see all the way back to the tail, 200 feet behind him. The fuselage was shattered and burning. He and Capt. Grubbs were alone in their seats, on a small, fully exposed perch 35 feet above the ground. Everything around them had been lifted away like a hat. Only the two seats, the forward instrument panel, and a couple of feet of sidewall remained. The second-officer and jump-seat stations, their occupants still strapped in, were hanging upside-down through what used to be the ceiling of the first-class cabin.

There was no option other than to jump. Bragg stood up, put one hand on the back of the captain’s seat, and hurled himself over the side. He landed in the grass below, feet first, and miraculously suffered little more than an injured ankle. Grubbs followed, and he too was mostly unharmed. (The others from the cockpit would unfasten their belts and shimmy down the sidewalls to the main cabin floor before similarly leaping to safety.)

Once on the ground, they faced a deafening roar. The plane had been pancaked into the grass, but because the cockpit control lines were severed, the engines were still running at full power. It took several moments before the motors began coming apart. Bragg remembers one of the engines’ huge forward turbofans detaching from its shaft, falling forward onto the ground with a thud.

The fuselage was engulfed by fire. A number of passengers, most of them seated in forward portions of the cabin, had made it onto the craft’s left wing, and were standing at the leading edge, about 20 feet off the ground. Bragg ran over, encouraging them to jump. At least one person was badly hurt when he inadvertently tumbled against a searing hot engine nacelle. A few minutes later, the plane’s center fuel tank exploded, propelling a plume of flames and smoke a thousand feet into the sky.

The airport’s ill-equipped rescue team, meanwhile, was over at the KLM site, the first wreckage they’d come to after learning there’d been a crash. They hadn’t yet realized that two planes were involved, one of them with survivors. Eventually, authorities opened the airport perimeter gates, urging anybody with a vehicle to drive toward the crash scene to help. Bragg tells the cracked story of standing there in fog, surrounded by stunned and bleeding survivors, watching his plane burn, when suddenly a taxicab pulls up out of nowhere.

Bragg returned to work a few months later. He eventually transferred to United when that carrier took over Pan Am’s Pacific routes in the late 1980s, and retired from the company as a 747 captain. Today he lives in Virginia with his wife, Dorothy.

Of the other survivors, not a lot is known. Like those from the Titanic or veterans of World War I, their ranks have steadily thinned over the years. Many of the Pan Am passengers were senior citizens at the time, on their way to a Mediterranean cruise. Either way, they are mostly gone now. (Jack Rideout remembers older passengers sitting fast in their seats following the impact, conscious and alert, yet making no efforts to escape.) Capt. Grubbs and the Pan Am second officer passed away some years ago.

On March 27, a memorial was dedicated overlooking the Tenerife airport to honor those who perished there. The sculpture is in the shape of a helix. “A spiral staircase,” says the foundation’s Web site, “… a symbol of infinity.” Maybe, but I’m greatly disappointed that the more obvious physical symbolism is ignored: Early-model 747s like those in the crash were well known for the set of spiral stairs connecting their main and upper decks. In the minds of millions of international travelers, that stairway became and remains an icon of civil aviation.

I’d like to tell you there will never be another Tenerife. Alas, for as long as there are airplanes, there will occasionally be terrible accidents, and some of them will occur on the ground. At the same time, there is plenty we can do to reduce the frequency at which those accidents occur. After several would-be Tenerife sequels, including a close call in 1999 between two 747s at Chicago-O’Hare, and another near miss two years ago at Boston-Logan involving an Aer Lingus A330 and a US Airways 737, the subject of “runway incursions,” to use the industry jargon, is receiving more attention than ever in airline and air traffic control training programs. Most large airports nowadays are equipped with ground tracking radar, and several have installed innovative lighting systems designed to keep crews from inadvertently crossing active runways or taxiways. An emerging, satellite-based technology known as ADS-B can provide pilots with a detailed view of surrounding ground traffic, while inexpensive units are available for VHF radios that inhibit a pilot or controller from transmitting onto an already busy frequency. Getting airlines to adopt the latter has been slow going, but the hardware is standard now in the latest radio equipment.

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During the Discovery Channel shoot, I traveled with Bob Bragg and the producers to the aircraft storage yards at Mojave, Calif., where he was interviewed alongside a mothballed 747. You can see him in this photograph, describing that incredible leap from the upper deck.

The day before, using a flight deck mock-up, director Phil Desjardins filmed a reenactment of the Tenerife collision, with a trio of actors sitting in as the KLM crew. The actors, who in the end did an excellent job, had studied the script well, but it was apparent during rehearsal that none had much understanding of airline flying or how to operate a jetliner’s controls. (Like many people intimate with airline flying, I’m quick to criticize the heavy-handed portrayals cooked up by Hollywood, but by the time Desjardins called “cut” for the seventh time, for a scene only 15 seconds long, I had a new appreciation for his art.)

At one point, to provide the actors with a helpful demo, it was suggested that Bragg and I get inside the mock-up and run through a practice takeoff. A good idea. Bragg took the captain’s seat, and I took the first officer’s seat. We read through a makeshift checklist and went through the motions of a simulated takeoff. That’s when I looked across, and all of a sudden it hit me:

Here’s Bob Bragg, lone surviving pilot of Tenerife, sitting in a cockpit, pretending to be Jacob van Zanten, whose error made the whole thing happen.
Surely Bragg wants no part of this twisted karma, and I hadn’t the courage to make note of it out loud — assuming it hadn’t already dawned on him. But I could barely keep the astonishment to myself. One more creepy irony in a story so full of them, even after 30 long years.

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