The near collision between a Russian and an Argentinean aircraft at the Barcelona airport filmed by an aviation enthusiast and posted on social media went viral with close to a billion hits. The Argentinean aircraft committed what aviation crcles describe an incursion. We are told that incursions on runways are common place and not all get reported. I had a firsthand experience of this some years back. It was when en route Sao Paulo that we were landing at Frankfurt. What appeared to be a smooth landing was suddenly aborted with a quick lift followed by an announcement by the captain that there was another aircraft on the runway!
It is another airport in Spain that holds the dubious record of being the site of the world’s worst aviation disaster. In 1978, two Boeing 747s collided at the Los Rodeos airport in Tenerife that resulted in close to 550 fatalities. The entire episode has been documented in the National Geographic series Air Crash investigation. When I lived in the Canary Islands and had an opportunity to take off from Los Rodeos, the vivid description of that disaster that I read in Time came alive in front of my eyes.
It is a matter of fate and destiny that events are meant to occur in certain sequences with their predetermined outcomes, good or bad. The story goes that the two aircraft were not meant to have been there in the first place. One belonged to PanAm and the other to KLM and both were to have landed at Gando, the airport of Gran Canaria (Tenerife and Gran Canaria are a part of the seven island archipelago called the Canary Islands). But as luck would have had it, minutes before landing, they were advised that Gando was closed after a terrorist bomb had exploded there killing one person. In the 70s, the Canarios were fighting a separatist battle seeking independence from the Spanish mainland. It looks like that battle lost steam, for when I resided in the Canarys in the early 90s, there were no signs of that separatist movement.
Incidentally, the Spanish people can be very regional and sectarian. For instance, as a resident of Gran Canaria, I had to be apologetic about my preference for the Tenerife beer! On a serious note, the bloody separatist battle that the terrorist group ETA fought for their province, Pais Vasco (Basque Country) would make the Khalistan movement seem like a minor riot. And if we believe Amma is being chauvinistic about Tamil, ask any Spaniard about his Catalan countrymen. Catalans are a proud race and when they hosted the 1992 Olympics in their city Barcelona, they decked it with Catalan colors and played the “national anthem” of Catalan in the presence of King Juan Carlos.
Coming back to the Tenerife disaster; the PanAm Clipper was all set to leave after Gando had been sanitized and opened for traffic. As luck would have it, the giant aircraft could not move as it was obstructed by the KLM that was refueling on the small tarmac. Los Rodeos is nestled between volcanic mountains and when the fog descends, the surrounding mountains make the fog settle making ground visibility near zero. The unlikely combination of a terrorist bomb, an airport closure, frustrated crew and dense fog got the giant two aircraft on an infernal rendezvous on the active runway, resulting in what is now described as the “Crash of the Century”.
The aviation expert who filmed the near miss can be heard exclaiming “Mi Dios” (My God) softly. If not for the expertise of the Russian pilot, the exclamation would have been louder and Barcelona would have been fielding the same guilt as Los Rodeos.
The-White-Belt 