Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Frozen in a Burning 747 (Tenerife Air Disaster 2)

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Two airplanes have just collided on the runway at Tenerife Airport. While no one on the Amsterdam-bound KLM plane survives the resulting fireball, 71 Pan-Am passengers and crew make it off their plane. But could it have been more? Why did so many Pan-Am passengers die, even though they weren’t injured by the initial collision and their plane was still on the ground? For a full list of sources see the show notes at timharford.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

PUSHKIN 58-year-old Jean Marshall Brown was sitting in the cabin of a Pan-American 747. She ran a travel company in La Mesa, California. She was leading a group of retired holidaymakers on a 12-day cruise of the Mediterranean. The trip hadn't got off to the best of starts. They'd had to divert to the next island over from where their cruise ship was waiting.

But now, at last, they were taxiing down the runway, ready for the final short leg of their journey, when... HE RUMBLES What on earth was that? ready for the final short leg of their journey, when... What on earth was that? Whatever just happened, some passengers near Jean have been killed. Over the next few minutes, the ruptured cabin of the Pan Am plane will be consumed by explosions, smoke and fire. And as Jean sits in her seat, a thought pops into her head. This is the way it feels to die in an airplane crash.

This is the second of our two-part series on the Tenerife air disaster of 1977, when two jumbo jets collided on the runway. It remains the deadliest accident in aviation history. In the previous episode, we asked why the captain of one of those airliners, operated by KLM, mistakenly believed had been cleared to take off when the runway was still blocked by the taxiing Pan Am. We heard how everyone on that KLM plane died in an instant fireball, as it clipped to the top of the Pan Am, then scutted down the runway. But on the Pan Am plane, a lot of people survived the impact. People like Jean Marshall Brown.

In this episode, like the previous one, we'll explore a quirk of the human brain. This time, we'll look at how the brain works in the moments after disaster strikes, suddenly and unexpectedly. How would you react? It may not be how you'd hope. Jean sat in her seat.

Time passed. It's hard to say how long. The fire caused by the impact grew stronger. Smoke started to fill the cabin. But Jean still didn't move. She just sat and watched. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Pan Am captain Victor Grubbs and First Officer Robert Bragg have had a frustrating afternoon. They've flown through the night from New York to the Canary Islands, but just before

they could land on Gran Canaria, a bomb threat closed the airport. They've had to divert to the tiny airport on the nearby island of Tenerife. When they get there, they discover lots of other planes have been diverted before them, including another 747, the KLM. Its captain has let his passengers disembark to kill time in the terminal, which is now rammed to capacity. Grubbs has to tell his passengers to stay on their plane. He feels bad about that. Most have been on board since California. He decides to invite everyone for a tour of the cockpit, and repeats the same apologetic

story. I asked if we could circle in the air until they were ready, but they insisted we land here. They've been hanging around for a couple of hours when word came through that Grand Canary's airport is open. The KLM captain has chosen this moment to start taking on more fuel, and his plane is blocking their way to the runway. Could they squeeze past? Captain Grubbs sends Robert Bragg and the flight engineer to pace out the distance. They come back with bad news.

The tarmac is just a few feet too narrow. They'd have to put one set of wheels on the grass, but the ground is soft, and the plane weighs over 300 tonnes. They can't risk getting stuck. Grubbs is annoyed. Another delay. And now thick fog is rolling in. Are they going to be able to take off at all?

He calls the KLM captain. How much longer are you going to be with that refuelling? About 20 minutes. Comes the reply. At last, the fuel trucks depart, and the KLM starts to taxi down the runway. Grubbs is told to follow them and take the third exit to the left.

It's so foggy. They take it slowly, just three miles an hour, looking at an airport map and peering through the window. Was that an exit there? On the radio, Grubbs, Bragg and the flight engineer hear the KLM plane talking to the control tower. Sounds like they've already reached the end of the runway and turned around.

We are now at takeoff. Now at takeoff? He'd better not try to take off yet. First officer Bragg reaches for the radio. And we're still taxiing down the runway, the Clipper 1736. Roger, Papa Alpha 1736, report the runway clear. OK, we'll report when we're clear. So the controller now knows that they're still on the runway.

But the message from the KLM plane has made the mood in the cockpit uneasy. Where is that exit? Let's get the hell out of here, says Grubbs. Bragg and the flight engineer grumble about the KLM captain. He sounds like he's in a hurry now, after he held them up to refuel. The bastard, says one. The prick, agrees the other. And now Grubb says, there he is.

Through the merc, Captain Grubb's has seen headlights on the runway ahead. For a moment, he seems to assume the KLM plane must be stationary, waiting at the end of the runway to be cleared to take off. Perhaps they've missed their exit and got almost to the end of the runway to be cleared to take off. Perhaps they've missed their exit and got almost to the end of the runway themselves. Hold on. Are those headlights getting closer? They are. That KLM plane is moving. It's moving quickly. It's heading straight for them.

Look at him. God damn. That son of a bitch is coming. Get off. Get off! Get off! Grubbs and Bragg both yank their controls hard to the left. Grubbs slams the throttle open. It's clear to them both that the KLM plane won't be able to stop. All they can do is try to get their own plane off the runway. It responds to their controls but agonisingly slowly. It weighs over 300 tonnes after all.

It starts a lumbering turn towards the edge of the runway. Its speed inches up to 19 miles an hour. The first set of wheels, just under the nose, drops off the runway and onto the grass. Bragg glances out of the window to his right. The KLM plane is right upon them. It's beginning to lift, but not high enough. He sees the red rotating beacon on its undercarriage.

It's the only time in my life I have ever saw something happening that I could not believe was happening. Instinctively, Bragg and Grubbs close their eyes and duck. The moment of impact feels surprisingly gentle. A bump and some shaking. It was a very slight impact, very slight noise, like... That was about it. It was so minor, it was unbelievable. Until I opened my eyes.

The first thing Bragg sees is the cockpit windows are gone. The next thing he sees is a fire on the wing to his right. He reaches up to pull the levers that will cut off the flow of fuel to the engines. The levers should be right above him on the ceiling, but his hands are grasping at air. He looks up. The levers aren't there, nor is the ceiling. Picture a 747, that hump on the top of the fuselage near the nose. The cockpit's at the front of that hump. Behind it, on this plane, was the first-class lounge.

When Bragg looks behind him, the lounge is gone, sheared away completely. I could see all the way to the tail of the airplane, just like someone had taken a big knife and sliced the entire top of the cabin of the airplane off. Captain Grubbs is first to get out of his seat. He turns to look back at where the lounge used to be. It had 28 passengers in it. One, a woman, is lying on what's left of the floor. Grubbs walks over towards her, but before he can get there, the floor collapses under him.

First Officer Bragg gets out of his seat. There's now only about a foot of floor left behind him in the cockpit. How is he going to get out of his seat. There's now only about a foot of floor left behind him in the cockpit. How is he going to get out of the plane? There is one direct way out. It's 38 feet down to the ground. He grabs hold of the captain's seat to steady himself

and jumps. GROAN 396 people were on board that Pan Am flight. 71 made it out, though some later died from their injuries. At the moment of impact, the plane was angled across the runway. The result of the pilots attempted left turn. The KLM plane lifted, but not high enough. An engine and landing gear ripped through parts of the Pan Am cabin. The passengers sitting directly in their path, such as those in the first class

lounge, never stood a chance. But what about those in other seats, who weren't in the way of the engine or the landing gear? Could more of them have made it out alive? Why didn't they? We'll explore how the mind responds to a sudden crisis after the break. One night in the early 1910s, the Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon woke up with a flash of inspiration. Cannon was writing a book about how emotions affect the functioning of animals' bodies. It was a new field of inquiry, and he'd stumbled across it by accident when using

the newly discovered technique of X-rays to study how digestion works. Cannon experimented on cats. He'd feed them some food mixed with bismuth salts which show up on x-rays, then he'd tie them down and watch on the fluoroscopic screen as the food travelled down the esophagus into the stomach. The cats, not surprisingly, sometimes took exception to being restrained. They'd cry out and struggle to get free. Cannon noticed something interesting. Whenever a cat got distressed, the movements in the stomach entirely disappeared.

I continued stroking the cat reassuringly. She became quiet and began to purr. As soon as this happened, the movements commenced again in the stomach. Cannon was intrigued. The cat's body seemed to be saying, in effect, I can't afford to waste energy on digesting food right now. I've got more important things to worry about. What else changed about how an animal's body functions when it gets upset?

Cannon found a whole range of common responses. The pulse quickens. There's a spike in blood sugar. More secretion from the adrenal glands. The book Cannon was writing is called Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. It became a classic, due in part to the sudden inspiration that woke him up in the night.

A clever form of words to tie together the physiological changes he'd discovered. The idea flashed through my mind that they could be nicely integrated if conceived as bodily preparations for supreme effort in flight or in fighting. Fight or flight? It's a great phrase, still in common use more than a century later. In

terms of evolution, it makes perfect sense. That's what animals typically have to do when they're in mortal peril. Either fight back or run away. We humans too experience that fight or flight suite of bodily changes in moments of sudden stress. But our first response is often not to fight or flee. was incomplete. As we'll hear, he missed out the most common F of all. In the cabin of Pan Am Flight 1736, the passengers haven't heard that ominous radio message from the KLM plane. We're now at takeoff. Most of them haven't been looking out of a right-hand window to see the headlights approaching through the fog. As far as they're concerned, this is just a routine taxi down the runway before a routine flight.

A-yawning, chatting, reading, slipping off their shoes, arranging their bags under their seats, when… arranging their bags under their seats when... BOOM!..as in the cockpit. The initial noise doesn't convey the severity of what's just happened. Survivors later liken it to a snapping twig, a swarm of bees passing overhead, or a length of adhesive tape being ripped off. One woman assumes that the shuddering thump must mean that

the pilot has veered off the edge of the runway in the fog. How annoyingly careless of him. No doubt they'll have to queue up now for the emergency exits. She calmly leans forward and reaches under the seat for her handbag, puts the strap over her shoulder, gets up and looks around. Only then does she see the carnage, blood and bodies everywhere. Some people are dead. Some have been hurt by flying bits of metal,

or the overhead luggage bins collapsing on top of them. Still others are unscathed, just confused about what's happened. There'd been talk of a bomb scare at the airport. Was it a bomb? It's hard to imagine your world being torn apart like that. It's hard to guess how you'd react. We all hope we'd react like passenger Jack Rideout, a 33-year-old entrepreneur sitting in first class. The first thing Rideout does is blurt out a call to action, seemingly as

much to himself as anyone. This is it, says Rideout. He unclips his seatbelt and gets up. He sees his girlfriend next to him, struggling to get her belt undone. He helps her up, and the two find their footing in the aisle, amid the fallen contents of the overhead luggage bins. Rideout looks to the right. He sees the fire starting on the wing. He looks to the left. He sees a hole ripped in the fuselage. He notices that the plane seems to be tilting to the left. He sees a hole ripped in the fuselage.

He notices that the plane seems to be tilting to the left. That's the way to get out then. Further from the fire, closer to the ground. Those engines are going to blow. We've got to get out of here. The hole in the fuselage is where the emergency exit door used to be. The door has gone. So has the door frame. is where the emergency exit door used to be. The door has gone. So has the door frame.

So is the inflatable chute that should activate when the door is opened. All that's left is a gaping hole framed by jagged metal and a 20-foot drop to the tarmac below. The girlfriend gets to the hole, looks down, and hesitates. This is no time to hesitate. Ride out, shouts her out. But he doesn't jump himself.

He turns back into the cabin, telling others what to do. This way. Come with me. He sees a flight attendant struggling to inflate a rubber raft. That's a good idea. It'll give people something to land on. He goes to help her.

But by now, the fire's starting to spread. Oxygen canisters and fire extinguishers are exploding in the heat. A fragment of metal shoots across the cabin and hits the attendant in the head. A fragment of metal shoots across the cabin and hits the attendant in the head, killing her. Rideout finishes inflating the raft and hurls it through the jagged hole. He looks around for anyone else to help out of the plane. There's an older woman, seemingly unconscious.

He picks her up but realises that she's dead already. Rideout puts the body down and decides it's time to jump to safety himself. He lands on the rubber raft. We'd all like to hope that in a sudden crisis, we'd react like Jack Rideout. Selfless, strong, and above all, self-possessed. Rideout quickly appraised his new situation.

The need to get out, the fire on the right, the hole on the left. That's the fight or flight response working as nature intended. A laser-like focus on the essential facts, quick and decisive action. But more often, things go quite differently. Our brains don't work as we'd like to hope they would. Take Warren Hopkins, 53 years old, a meat wholesaler from Illinois, and his wife Caroline. They're also sitting in first class. In the moments after the impact, Hopkins reacted just as quickly as Jack Rideout. He touched

his wife on the arm and said, let's go. He unbuckled his seatbelt, picked his way across the debris in the aisle and launched himself through the jagged hole in the fuselage. Only when he'd landed did he remember that he'd forgotten to check that his wife was with him. She wasn't, because Caroline had forgotten something else. How to unbuckle a seatbelt. How strange. She found herself thinking, I must have unbuckled airplane seatbelts a hundred times and I can't remember how to do it. She later said she thought she might have been trying to press a button

like you would in a car. Eventually she remembered how airline seatbuckles unclasp and made her way to the jagged hole. She looked down and felt vertiginous. She reached out to hold something and gashed her hand. She jumped and landed awkwardly on her shoulder. Warren dragged her away. She managed to get up and saw that a wound in his head

was gushing blood over his formal white dress shirt. Warren hadn't realised. That's part of fight or flight. There's no time to feel pain. Caroline slipped off her floral patterned underskirt and wrapped it around Warren's head wound. She noticed the gash on her hand and wrapped it in a handkerchief. Warren and Caroline Hopkins later worked with the author John Ziemek to gather recollections from fellow survivors for his book, Collision on Tenerife.

Their stories of leaps, burns and broken bones, but their stories about other passengers too. Passengers who weren't making any attempt at all to get themselves free. One survivor recalled, They just didn't move. I believe at least another 100 could have been saved, but they were sitting there just transfixed. Another said, It was like catching a deer in your headlights.

Eight decades earlier, when the Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon coined the phrase, fight or flight, he missed out what may be the most important F of all. Most people on that plane didn't fight or try to flee, like Jack Rideout or Warren Hopkins. Instead,

they froze. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. John Leitch is a cognitive psychologist who studies human survival. In 2004, he published a paper, Why People Freeze in an Emergency. Leach studied survivor accounts of 11 disasters on airplanes, oil rigs and ships. One person who got off a sinking ferry recalled how they hadn't been able to understand why others weren't trying to help themselves. They just sat there, being swamped by the water when it came in. Leach came to the startling conclusion that freezing wasn't just common, it was the

most common response to disaster. It happened to about 75% of people in the cases he studied. The classic response to danger, wrote Leitch, should be restated as fight, flight or freeze. We hope we'd react like Jack Rideout. We're more likely to be deer in headlights. But what's going on when people freeze? There are two possibilities. Hard to tell apart from the outside, but quite different. Physiologists reserve the term freezing for something that happens before the fight or flight response.

The same bodily changes are going on. The surge of adrenaline, the thumping heart. We're primed for action, but not acting yet. It's as if the body has slammed on both the accelerator and the brake at the same time. In the animal world, this can make perfect sense. You've seen a predator, you're not sure if the predator has seen you. You stay very, very still and hope the predator goes away. If it comes for you, the break comes off and you fight or you flee. The other freezing scenario happens after fight or flight are no longer options. You're trapped. The predator has got you.

In this situation you'll sometimes see animals stop struggling and play dead. This too has evolutionary logic. Predators don't want to eat meat that might have been dead for a while. It could poison them. Play dead and they might lose interest. It's a last, desperate roll of the dice. Physiologists call this state tonic immobility. And it seems to happen to humans too. Were some Pan Am passengers experiencing tonic immobility? We can't ask the ones who died, but it seems likely. One survivor recalls hearing an elderly woman turn to her husband

and say, I think this is it. The same words as Jack Rideout, but a different meaning. The task of getting out is realistically beyond us. Perhaps it was. But we can ask the passengers who froze initially before the brakes came off and fight or flight kicked in. Remember Jean Marshall Brown? This is the way it feels to die in an airplane crash.

She found herself thinking, before she sat and watched the cabin fill with smoke around her. And then another thought popped into Jean's head. We can get out of here. That thought unfroze her. Jean turned to the couple sitting next to her, who were also deer in headlights. Unfasten your seat belts, she told them.

We've got to get out. They clambered out of the broken fuselage and onto the wing. We can't know for sure how long Jean was frozen, but she thinks they were the last ones out. If she had stayed frozen for another few seconds, the fire would have been too intense to survive. It already was for the couple she had roused. They jumped from the wing, but died from their burns.

Jean spent two months in hospital and lived. What can snap you out of a freeze? Gene Marshall Brown's story suggests there are two things – a thought popping into your head, or someone else showing you the way. Gene's story was mirrored elsewhere on the airplane. David Alexander was 29 years old, an amateur photographer. He later wrote a book about his experience called Never Wait for the Fire Truck. Just like Gene, David Alexander remembers the first thought to cross his mind.

I am going to die. Then along came another thought. No I'm not. Alexander doesn't remember what he did next. Not forming memories is another common feature of the fight or flight response. But a couple sitting near him later told him what he did, and how it made them realise what they too had to do. They saw him climb up onto the back of his seat and clamber his way out of a hole in

the ceiling. They got up from their seats and followed his route out of the plane. The psychologist John Leach says that when people freeze in an emergency, it's because their memory contains no appropriate response for their brain to latch onto. And as stress hormones flood their brains, they can't come up with one. Their thinking is sluggish, their reasoning impaired. If you know there's a particular kind of emergency you might encounter, you can train for it, do drills again and again until the right response pops straight into your brain. That makes sense for soldiers or pilots. See a fire on the

wing? Reach above you for the levers that cut off the fuel to the engine. But most of us aren't likely ever to be in an airplane crash or a sinking ferry. Training again and again for specific emergencies isn't a wise use of our time. So what can we do to reduce the likelihood that we freeze if disaster strikes? The best advice is boringly predictable. Don't ignore the in-flight safety briefing. But the experience of Gene Marshall Brown and David Alexander tells us why we should pay attention, even if we've heard it a hundred times before.

In a sudden disaster, you can't predict which thoughts will flash into your mind. I'm going to die, or we can get out of here. If you've recently said to yourself, my nearest emergency exit is three rows behind, maybe that thought will pop into your head. It might be enough to save you. Years after the crash, Jack Rideout talked to a journalist at the Los Angeles Times. He was, of course, haunted by flashbacks. But the most disturbing memory? Not when he exclaimed, this is it. Not the flight attendant being killed by shrapnel while trying to inflate the rubber raft. Not shoving his girlfriend

through the jagged hole in the fuselage. What kept coming back to him, said Rideout, was seeing all those people, not harmed, but not doing anything, just looking calmly ahead. Hundreds of them, he thought. They could all have got out. Hundreds. An exaggeration, surely. But perhaps not by much. Investigators later tried to piece together how many people had died in the collision and how many survived the impact but died in the fire. They did this by seeing if the bodies had soot in the trachea.

That would indicate they'd still been breathing as smoke filled the cabin. Almost half the bodies were too badly burned to tell either way. Of the others, they found 60 without soot. They had been killed before the fire took hold. But almost twice as many, 118, did have soot in the trachea. These people had survived the crash, then died in the inferno. Some, no doubt, had been knocked unconscious or injured too badly to move. But others, it seemed, simply froze until they burned.

First Officer Robert Bragg falls 38 feet and rolls on the grass. He's broken an ankle, but he doesn't notice that. Captain Victor Grubbs tumbles through the floor into the main first class seating area, then falls through that floor too into the cargo hold. He sees a hole, ripped in the side of the hold, and wriggles towards it. He drops onto the tarmac and lies there, burned and bleeding. Someone comes towards him. It's one of the flight attendants. He looks at her. What have I done to these people?

She slips a hand under his arm. Crawl, Captain. Crawl. Grubbs drags himself away from the fiery wreckage. He finds Robert Bragg. He gets to their feet. A passenger approaches them. It's Warren Hopkins, wearing one shoe, a blood-soaked white dress shirt,

and his wife's floral-p patterned underskirt wrapped around his head. What in the hell happened? That crazy bastard did it. The KLM took off. He was supposed to be holding and he took off. They watch as fire and explosions consume what's left of the Pan Am 747. It makes no sense, but they got out. By now, for anyone else who could have, it's too late. An important source for this episode was Collision on Tenerife, the how and why of the world's

worst aviation disaster by John Ziemek and Caroline Hopkins. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Corortionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Vital Mollard, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.