Runway to catastrophe
Have two planes ever collided on the Tarmac?
the deadliest airline disaster of all time was an airfield collision. On March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 jumbo jets — Pan Am 1736, originating in Los Angeles, and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines 4805, a charter from Amsterdam — crashed at tenerife’s Los Rodeos Airport. Of the total 644 people on board, 583 were killed.
the accident followed a sequence of unfortunate events. that afternoon, a bomb planted by the Canary Islands Independence Movement exploded in the terminal of Gran Canaria International Airport, injuring eight people. the group warned other bombs had been planted.
the airport was closed and incoming air traffic diverted to Los Rodeos Airport, which had a single runway and was barely big enough to handle such craft.
Flight 4805 was piloted by Captain Jacob van Zanten, who was in charge of training all the Dutch airline’s 747 captains. Flight 1736 was under the command of Captain Victor Grubbs, a veteran pilot with more than 21,000 hours of flying time.
As both planes waited for several hours, a dense fog descended. eventually, the air traffic control tower sent a message to the KLM flight to taxi to the end of the runway and turn around. It instructed the Pan Am flight to follow. When the KLM jet announced it was ready to go, the Pan Am pilots became startled and clicked their mic to say: ‘We’re still on the runway!’
however, due to radio interference, the KLM plane never got the message. thinking he was cleared for take-off, van Zanten sent his plane rocketing down the runway, where the Pan Am plane was taxiing, with devastating consequences.
Harry Bowyer, Bournemouth.
Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton were former teachers. Which other authors took this path to fame?
theRe are many examples, but the most striking has to be the Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding. he taught english and music at Maidstone Grammar School in Kent from 1938 to 1940 and english from 1945 to 1961 at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
During this time, he wrote Lord Of the Flies — the story of a group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. No doubt he drew heavily upon his experience as a teacher.
In April 1932, eric Arthur Blair became a teacher at the hawthorns high School for boys in hayes, West London. Under his pen-name, George Orwell, he went on to write some of the 20th century’s most enduring classics, including Down And Out In Paris And London, Nineteen eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s tragicomic memoir of his tough Limerick upbringing and life in America, earned him the Pulitzer Prize. Unlike Golding and Orwell, teaching was the focus of his life and he taught at six New York schools.
Philip Pullman, author of the his Dark Materials trilogy, began teaching nine to 13-year- olds at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford, in 1970. he taught english at various Oxford schools before moving to Westminster College in 1986, where he taught students on an education course.
Maggie Boswell, Wells, Somerset. IN JANUARY 1925, not long after he had graduated from Oxford with a thirdclass degree, evelyn Waugh took a job at Arnold house Preparatory School in North Wales. his miserable experience there led him to write one of literature’s great comic novels, Decline And Fall.
he identified with his character Paul Pennyfeather, meekly accepting the vicissitudes of life after being sent down from Oxford and being ‘debagged’ (having his trousers removed) by the Bollinger Club. One of Waugh’s great characters, Captain at Arnold Grimes, house. was he based winds on up a master at the school having been dishonourably discharged from the Army. he cushions his miseries with alcohol and corporal punishment, often finding himself ‘in the soup’, as he puts it. the town of Llanddulas, where Arnold house was situated, became Llanabba Castle. Marc Preston, Criccieth, Caernarfonshire.
Is it true Winston Churchill was chosen as Prime Minister after the favoured candidate Lord Halifax had to go to the dentist with toothache?
the previous answer was correct in stating that halifax did not have the stomach to be Prime Minister and the dental appointment was a classic bit of ‘Chips’ Channon gossip.
halifax remained a thorn in Churchill’s side. Churchill kept him on as Foreign Secretary, yet, in late May 1940, they argued bitterly when halifax proposed to negotiate with hitler. exasperated, Churchill made halifax Britain’s ambassador to Washington DC.
this was a mistake, as Nicholas J. Cull, the author of Selling War: the British Propaganda Campaign Against American ‘Neutrality’ In World War II, pointed out: ‘[Lord] halifax was the 6ft 6in, living, breathing personification of every negative stereotype that Americans nurtured with regard to Britain — the very antithesis of the dynamic new nation of Spitfires and the Dunkirk spirit.’
In Britain, halifax was nicknamed the holy Fox, reflecting his passion for hunting and his Christian outlook.
Richard Newell, Newbury, Berks.