DUTCH

 

WALTER and Irene Vedder are buried side by side at the Westminster Cemetery in California. Walter was related to Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, and a descendant of the Vedders from Spakenburg. Irene wrote poems that were actually published. He was an engineer, an expert in air pollution, especially dust clouds. He had stuck his nose into them so many times that he moved from Maryland to the Pacific on doctor’s orders.

Flying today is safer than ever. We owe this to Walter and Irene Vedder, and to 581 others. On March 27, 1977, their two Boeing 747s collided in the fog on a Tenerife runway. The Vedders were in the PanAm Jumbo that had just landed from Los Angeles. The other aircraft was a KLM plane from Amsterdam. The disaster is still the most deadly in aviation history. The Dutch captain was to blame.

FLYING was also safe back in 1977, technically. The 747 was and is a great plane, and in Tenerife there was nothing wrong with either aircraft. What was wrong had two reasons. One was fog, made worse by dirty air that Walter Vedder was an expert in. The other was the communication between the traffic control tower and the cockpits, and between the KLM pilots themselves – which was strange.

The KLM Boeing was flown by captain Veldhuyzen van Zanten. KLM advertised his face. He was the in-house chief instructor, taking other pilots’ exams, passing or failing them. Nobody knew cockpit rules and regulations better than he did. His two co-pilots that day looked up at him. None of them knew the airport where they were, Los Rodeos, and neither did the PanAm Boeing crew. They were supposed to land not there but at Gran Canaria Airport, however that was closed after a bomb went off.

The Vedders’ plane had just landed and was rolling out towards the end of the runway to find an exit to the taxiway. The KLM captain was in a hurry, and was entering the runway. He knew the rules. If he weren’t up in the air soon, he wouldn’t be able to take off at all, for he would have exhausted his maximum number of cockpit hours for the day, which was going to cause a significant delay. He told the tower that he was departing. The tower said something back but was vague. The captain started thundering down the runway regardless. No one could see anything because of the fog. Veldhuyzens co-pilot to his right did not say a word, because the captain was a saint.

The KLM Boeing drilled into the PanAm aircraft at maximum take-off speed, 583 people lost their lives, and, oddly, flying became instantly safer. After all investigations were completed, stringent requirements were placed on communication between pilots and air traffic controllers, and between pilots amongst themselves.

Any question or answer from a pilot must now begin or end with the flight’s call sign, e.g. KL4805, the word departure is off-limits and is now take-off, and if the tower does not use the word clear, the pilot may not take off or land. The tower always has the final say in a take-off, pilots are no longer allowed to answer with OK or Roger, but must repeat the instructions aloud, English became the only language of communication. And co-pilots worldwide are now trained to speak up if they think the captain is making a mistake. The deaths of nearly 600 people have since saved the lives of thousands.

* The Vedders memorialized at the Tenerife Memorial in Westminster, California.