At Tenerife's Los Rodeos Airport, a KLM Boeing 747 initiated takeoff without air traffic control clearance and smashed into a Pan Am 747 waiting on the runway, resulting in 583 fatalities. No one aboard the KLM aircraft survived, and only 71 people escaped from the Pan Am wreckage.

Yes, in the Tenerife airport disaster of March 27, 1977—which remains the deadliest accident in aviation history—there were 61 survivors, all of whom were on the Pan Am Boeing 747. Tragically, all 248 passengers and crew on the KLM Boeing 747 perished when the two "Jumbo Jets" collided on a fog-shrouded runway. Of the 396 people on the Pan Am aircraft, many were able to escape through holes in the fuselage or by jumping onto the wing as the plane was engulfed in flames. Among the notable survivors were the Pan Am cockpit crew: Captain Victor Grubbs, First Officer Robert Bragg, and Flight Engineer George Warns. The survivors' accounts of the chaos, including the sound of the KLM plane's engines roaring overhead just before impact, were instrumental in the subsequent investigation. This disaster led to sweeping changes in international aviation, including standardized cockpit communication (the use of "takeoff" only when authorized) and a greater focus on "Crew Resource Management" to ensure that such a catastrophic breakdown in safety protocols never occurs again.