On a passage from the recent book “Doom” by historian Niall Ferguson
One of the case studies in the book (starts on page 258) is about one of the worst airline accidents in history, the 1977 collision of a Pan Am plane with a KLM one on a Spanish airport that killed 583 people, although some from the Pan Am plane survived.
Ferguson gives a detailed analysis of the reasons the accident happened including a terrorist bomb threat that had diverted flights to this airport and congested it and regulations that made the KLM pilot want to leave the airport fast,
My main takeaway from this is that it was a case of communal error. There’s a pop song called “No One’s to Blame,” but it seems to me almost everyone is usually to blame for disasters. I made the same observation in a past blog about The Great Gatsby; almost every character in the novel plays a role in what happens.