Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 27th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-27-Where-the-Streets-Have-No-Name-K3K61CMH37
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Paella
Bummer March 27th
March 27, 1977: The single deadliest aviation accident (as of this writing) occurs on the Spanish island of Tenerife when two jets collide on the runway. Both KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736 had been diverted to Los Rodeos Airport (as Tenerife North Airport was known at the time) from Gran Canaria Airport. A terrorist group fighting for the Canary Islands’ independence from Spain had set off a bomb at Gran Canaria, injuring eight people and causing all airline traffic to be rerouted.
As the Pan Am jet sat on the runway, the Dutch plane, unaware that the Pan Am was directly in its path, began its takeoff run. Conditions on the ground were foggy and it seems that the Dutch plane didn’t correctly identify the runway its crew was being asked to use. A lack of standardized language in the communication between the Dutch pilots and air traffic control may have caused the pilots to think they had been cleared for takeoff when they should have waited.
Both crews made valiant last-minute efforts to avoid collision, but it was too late. Everyone on the Dutch jet, 248 people, were killed, as were 335 people on the Pan Am jet. Of the 61 survivors on the Pan Am jet, almost all were in the nose section of the plane, including the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. The full fuel tanks on both aircraft contributed to fires that made rescue efforts more difficult.
On the bright side, the commercial aviation industry as a whole added regulations to standardize communications so that miscommunication of this type would be much less likely from then on.
March 27, 2004: Richard Lancelyn Green, a noted scholar of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is found dead in his home at the age of 50. His sister, who worries when he doesn’t answer his phone, finds him face-down on this bed, garotted with a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon.
In his last days, Green has been observed acting erratically and complaining that an unnamed American was following him and that his apartment was bugged. Green’s paranoia seemed to stem from his actions in trying to stop an auction of Doyle’s papers, which Green believed were part of a collection Doyle’s daughter had intended to be donated to the British Museum rather than auctioned to the public. It remains unclear whether Green was murdered or staged his suicide to seem like a murder, as a character had done in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”
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