The Curse of Tenerife: The crash of Dan-Air flight 1008

In Europe, the tourism industry has long relied on package deals called “inclusive tours,” where holidaymakers buy the plane ride, the hotel stays, and the scheduled activities in a single package from a tour operator. Many airlines over the years have carved out a niche by providing charter flights to inclusive tour operators; other such airlines were founded by the tour operators themselves to reduce costs. While the latter type, such as TUI, dominates the industry today, in the 1970s and 1980s British airline Dan-Air rose to become the largest independent airline in the United Kingdom by doing the former — along with a laundry list of other activities that few other airlines would consider.

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Dan-Air was a true jack-of-all-trades. Between its founding in 1953 and its absorption into British Airways in 1992, it carried out a wide range of services, including but not limited to inclusive tour charters, regular charters, scheduled passenger flights, scheduled cargo flights, chartered cargo flights, flights carrying migrant workers, Royal Mail flights, and oil field support flights. If it was possible to make money by conducting a flight, Dan-Air did it. Dan-Air even branched out into continental Europe with a second hub in West Berlin, from which it carried out charter flights for German tour operators and even scheduled domestic passenger flights within West Germany.

At Tenerife, the prevailing winds blow in from the west, out of the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. But today, they were blowing the opposite way, from the east, forcing incoming planes to land on the rarely used runway 12 instead of the usual runway 30. Captain Whelan had flown to Tenerife North Airport 58 times, but he had never once landed on runway 12.

The regular procedure for landing on runway 12 was to fly to the Tenerife North VOR, a VHF radio beacon northeast of the airport. From this beacon (known as TFN), planes would turn toward another beacon called a locator, designated FP, situated just west of the runway threshold. They would then proceed directly away from the airport in line with the runway, turn around over the ocean, and reverse course to land.

One of Dan-Air’s 727s was G-BDAN, which was scheduled to fly an inclusive tour charter flight from Manchester, England to Tenerife in the Canary Islands on the 25th of April, 1980. The 138 passengers were mostly British tourists who had bought a holiday package that would allow them to enjoy Tenerife’s pleasant beaches, spectacular mountains, and otherworldly volcanic landscapes. In command of the flight were three pilots: 50-year-old Captain Arthur “Red” Whelan, who had over 15,000 flight hours; 33-year-old First Officer Michael Firth, who had around 3,500 hours; and a 33-year-old Flight Engineer, Raymond Carey. A team of five flight attendants brought the total number of occupants to 146.

Dan-Air’s fleet was equally diverse. The airline developed a strategy of buying extremely cheap second-hand airplanes of a wide range of sometimes unusual types. Early in its period of expansion, Dan-Air managed to acquire a large fleet of de Havilland Comet 4s, the only successful version of the world’s first ever jet airliner, and continued to operate them until 1980. The rest of the airline’s core fleet consisted of equally large numbers of BAC One-Elevens, Hawker Siddeley HS 748 turboprops, and Boeing 727s. Dan-Air was the first British operator to fly the 727, which in its factory layout did not meet British safety standards, forcing Dan-Air make a number of unique modifications, such as an extra emergency exit door on each side. Its Berlin-based 727s were modified even further with extra fuel tanks inside the fuselage to allow them to fly non-stop from Germany to the Canary Islands.

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