Mayday

Crash of the Century

Aired Aug 13, 2006 · 1:00 PM ET · 45 min

March 27, 1977 – At 2:00 in the afternoon a thick fog rolled into the usually quiet Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. On the runway sat two fully loaded jumbo airliners, blanketed in fog. A bomb explosion at a nearby airport had re-directed air traffic to the undermanned airfield at Tenerife. Within three hours, a KLM 747 slams into a taxiing PAM 747, killing 583 people. The planes never left the ground.