Shadowing Practice: How did ONE missing letter crash this plane? | Dan Air 1008 - Learn English Speaking with Video
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On April 25th, 1980, Tenerife North Airport in the Canary Islands had its second major air crash in just three years.
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The previous incident, involving the collision of two 747s on the runway, remains to this day the most deadly air crash in history, having killed nearly 600 people.
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That accident cast a long shadow over the world of aviation
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and in that shadow hides the crash of Danair Flight 1008 to this day.
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The surprising thing about this crash is not that it happened, but that it took so long to happen.
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This accident was lying in wait for years, and on April 25th, 1980, a perfect storm of chance occurrences came together which would lead to the deaths of everyone on board Danair Flight 1008.
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Let's take a look at the events that led up to its final moments.
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Danair Flight 1008 departed Manchester Airport in England at 20 past 9 on the morning of April 25th, 1980.
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On board were 138 passengers and 8 crew.
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Most of the passengers were British holidaymakers, escaping a grey English spring for the sunny beaches and dramatic landscapes of the Canary Islands.
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On the flight deck were three experienced pilots.
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Captain Arthur Whelan, at 50 years old, had over 15,000 hours of flying experience.
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He was familiar with the route on this day, having flown to Tenerife 58 times before.
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His last visit was in January of that year.
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His co-pilot, Michael Firth, was 33 years of age, and he had just under 3,500 flying hours.
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He had flown to Tenerife nine times in total, most recently four months previously, just before Christmas Day the year before the crash.
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This being an older aircraft, there was also a third person in the cockpit.
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This man was 33-year-old Raymond Carey.
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He was seated behind the two pilots and manning the flight engineer station.
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Carey had just under 3,500 hours of flying experience.
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The plane they were flying was a 13-year-old Boeing 727, a short to medium haul trijet which had begun production in the 1960s
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and enjoyed a popular run with airlines from
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that time up until its retirement from passenger service during the 1990s and early 2000s.
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This aircraft was one of a number of 727s in the Danair fleet.
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For the first three or so hours, the flight went as planned.
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At about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, the crew began their descent towards Tenerife.
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About 15 minutes later, they made first contact with Tenerife Approach Control, informing them that they were 14 nautical miles from the Tenerife North VOR radio beacon and flying at 11,000 feet.
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Approach Control cleared the flight to the Foxtrot Papa beacon via the Tenerife VOR
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and told them that they would be landing on runway 12 without delay.
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A few moments ago I mentioned that Captain Whelan had flown into Tenerife 58 times before this flight.
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Despite this, he had never once landed on runway 12.
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The winds usually came from across the Atlantic to the west, but on this day they were coming from the opposite direction, meaning that the opposite runway was in use.
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This seemingly minor detail would set the stage for the disaster to come.
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The usual procedure for landing on runway 12, and the one which ATC had told the pilots they were going to use, was to fly to the Tenerife North VOR,
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a radio beacon northeast to the airport and then turn towards another beacon located just over the runway called Foxtrot Papa.
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From there, they would turn out over the ocean and then turn back around to come in and land on runway 12.
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This should not have been a problem.
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However, there was one issue that the controller hadn't accounted for.
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A few miles ahead of flight 1008 was another plane, a slower turboprop operated by Iberia, Spain's national airline.
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The 727 flown by the Danair crew was significantly faster than the turboprop, and they were rapidly catching up with the aircraft in front.
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An additional problem was that the controller didn't have radar.
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As a result, he had to rely on pilots reports of where they were.
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At 18 minutes past 1, the pilots of Flight 1008 reported to ATC that they had passed the Tenerife North beacon.
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The controller was surprised that the crew had passed this beacon so soon.
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He realised that the Danair flight was travelling much faster than the Iberia turboprop ahead, so he decided to put the Dan airplane into a holding
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pattern above the airport to give the Iberia plane time to land.
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There was an issue, however.
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Since Runway 12 was almost never used, there were no official holding patterns published which suited the runway.
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All of the holding patterns in the charts were made for Runway 30.
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The controller decided to improvise and he made up a holding pattern on the spot.
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He wanted the pilots to fly over the Foxtrot Papa beacon, then to turn northwest out over the sea, then turn back towards the beacon heading 150 degrees,
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and from there the pilots would make a left-hand 180 degree turn onto a heading of 330 degrees, then turn left again heading 150 to intercept the Foxtrot Papa beacon,
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and so on, repeating this pattern around Foxtrot Papa until the controller told them otherwise.
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To inform the pilots of this plan, he said, Roger, the er, standard holding pattern overhead Foxtrot Papa is inbound heading 150, turn to the left, call you back shortly.
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This is where things really started to go wrong.
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What the controller had meant to say was, turns to the left, as in, the holding pattern contains left-hand turns.
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What he mistakenly said was, turn to the left.
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This instruction made little sense to the crew.
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From their current position northeast of the airport, they needed to turn right to begin to find the holding pattern.
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Instead, the controller was telling them to turn left.
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Rather than asking for clarification, First Officer Firth just replied, Roger, Danair 1008.
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Now the controller had no idea that the pilots had misunderstood his instructions, and the pilots had no idea that the controller didn't want them to turn left at all.
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The crew began setting up their navigation equipment to fly this holding pattern.
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They figured that once they reached the Foxtrot Papa beacon, they should then turn left and fly away from it on a heading of 150, then await further instructions from the controller.
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Captain Whelan commented, That's an odd sort of one, referring to the holding pattern.
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He added, One to go, meaning that they were now 1,000 feet above their assigned altitude of 6,000 feet.
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First Officer Firth was likely looking at his charts as he said, No, I'm not.
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I suppose it's alright.
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He was probably discovering at this point that the holding pattern described by the controller as the standard hold
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wasn't on any of the charts.
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The captain replied saying that he would just turn left once he flew over the Foxtrot Papa Beacon, and first agreed.
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Then the captain noticed that at their speed, they were mere seconds away from overflying the beacon, and would overshoot it even if they started their turn now.
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This meant that they wouldn't be able to fly away from it on a heading of 150, but rather at some different heading.
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When they passed the Foxtrot Papa beacon, the First Officer called ATC, saying, Danair 1008 is at Foxtrot Papa, level at 60, taking up the hold.
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Despite this, Captain Whelan didn't begin the left-hand turn to enter what he thought was the hold for another 20 seconds, during which time he had flown two miles closer to the mountain.
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Both pilots were still confused about the hold, with the First Officer saying, Bloody strange hold, isn't it? and the Captain commenting that it wasn't even parallel with the runway.
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Despite their confusion, neither pilot asked the controller to clarify the holding instructions.
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As the pilots continued their turn to the left, the controller cleared them down to 5,000 feet.
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They were now descending through the clouds and suddenly the captain said, Hey, did he say it was 150 inbound?
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Inbound, yeah, replied Firth.
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That's… I don't like that.
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Whelan was starting to notice that something had gone wrong, but he hadn't quite put the pieces together yet.
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He'd been flying outbound from the beacon at a heading of 150 degrees, but this conflicted with what he remembered the controller wanted, which was to fly towards the beacon on a heading of 150.
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Just then, the aircraft flew over a mountain ridge, and the increasing closure with the ground triggered the plane's ground proximity warning system.
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Straight away, the captain said, Okay, overshoot.
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He's taking us around to the high ground.
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The captain had a false picture of where he was.
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He believed that he was to the north of the mountain
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and that his left-hand turn had brought the plane on a collision course with it.
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As a result he turned right to avoid the mountain.
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What he didn't know was that he was actually east of the mountain
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and that the right-hand turn he was now making would point him straight for it.
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Ten seconds later the ground proximity warning stopped.
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This was not because the plane was safe however, it was just that it was now flying over a valley instead of a ridge
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and the rate of closure with the ground had reduced.
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Despite this, First Officer Firth realised that a turn to the right was the wrong response.
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He had likely been looking at the charts
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and comparing it to the information on his navigation instruments and realised the true position of the plane.
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He said, Captain Whelan didn't absorb the import of what his first officer was saying,
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however, and he again repeated, And, rather than insisting on his preferred course of action, the first officer just replied, yeah.
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The captain continued the steep right-hand turn, losing 300 feet of altitude in the process.
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He then called air traffic control, saying, Danair 1008, we've had ground proximity warning.
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At the same time, the flight engineer warned, bank angle, bank angle.
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These were the last words in the cockpit voice recorder.
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Flight 1008 smashed nose first into the side of the Esperanza mountain, travelling at over 460 kilometres an hour.
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Everyone on board was killed instantly.
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The controller didn't know that the plane had crashed, and he tried to call it on the radio to ask about its troubling transmission.
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After a number of attempts to call the plane went unanswered, he alerted the emergency services.
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Nobody had witnessed the crash, but the force of the impact had thrown some of the wreckage up over the top of the mountain, where it tumbled down
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and came to rest on the main road between the town of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the Tade National Park.
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Passing motorists only realised what the wreckage was when they heard on the radio that a plane had crashed.
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Rescuers hiked up the mountain and reached the wreckage by about 8pm that evening, but it was clear when they arrived that nobody could have survived the impact.
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Investigators quickly recovered the black boxes and began to analyze their contents.
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Because the flight was operated by a British airline and the crash happened in Spanish territory, both British and Spanish investigators were involved in the investigation.
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Perhaps in an effort to avoid placing the blame on their fellow countrymen, the British investigators emphasized the controller's confusing instructions as a primary contributor to the crash.
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The Spanish investigators, on the other hand, said that it was the pilot's responsibility to read back the instructions given to them by the controller, so that the controller could check that they had understood them.
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Even today, Spanish controllers are infamous for their poor English and their use of non-standard phraseology.
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This situation was even worse in 1980, and Captain Whelan would have been well aware of this, having flown to Tenerife many times.
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If here the first officer had simply asked the controller to clarify his instructions, this accident would never have happened.
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The first officer was also a lot less insistent than he
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could have been during the captain's fateful right-hand turn towards the mountain.
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He had only once suggested that the captain take a different course and when he was effectively dismissed for this, he didn't challenge him again.
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This was despite the fact that he likely had a good understanding of where the plane was, as he had been closely monitoring the navigation equipment in the preceding minutes.
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Finally, the captain's response to hearing the ground proximity warning was inappropriate.
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Pilots are trained to immediately put the plane into as steep a climb as possible when they hear the ground-boximity warning alarm.
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The captain was so convinced that he was to the north of the mountain, however, that he considered that a turn would be sufficient to avoid collision.
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In this turn, he lost 300 feet of altitude, which put him 100 feet below the peak of the mountain.
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The real tragedy here is that even
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if he had done nothing upon hearing the alarm and just kept the plane flying exactly as it had been doing, he would have cleared the mountain and the accident would never have happened.
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Ultimately, however, this was just the last link in a long chain of causes for this crash.
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The ground proximity warning system is a last line of defense
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and the very fact that it was triggered means that things had already gone badly wrong.
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If we follow this chain of causation backwards step by step we find that the real problem, the one which had plagued the Canary Islands for decades and cost almost a thousand lives during the 1970s,
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80s and 90s, was in fact the terrible infrastructure that existed at Spanish airports at the time.
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Despite the collision of two 747s on the runway at that very same airport just three years earlier, no radar had been installed at Tenerife.
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This meant that the safety of any flights operating in the area in foggy
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or dark conditions was fully dependent on perfect communication between controllers and pilots and precise navigation by flight crews.
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There was no room for error.
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Even the approach procedures to the airport were poorly designed.
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There were no published holding patterns for approaches into runway 12
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and the typical approach for runway 12 involved flying over the high terrain rather than simply approaching from out over the sea.
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Gradually over the 20 years following this accident and other similar ones across southern Europe improvements were made to airport infrastructure.
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This included a European-wide effort to install radar at all major airports and in the case of Tenerife North,
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a simplified approach path which took planes out over the sea to line up with the runway rather than over the mountains.
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Thanks to these and other improvements, flying into the Canary Islands is a lot safer today than it was in the 1970s and 80s.
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In fact, there's not been another crash of a passenger airliner in Tenerife since 1999.
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If you found this video interesting, subscribe for weekly air accident videos.
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As always, if you have any ideas for future episodes, let me know in the comments section.
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Thanks again for watching.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 151 sentences and 2563 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:31. The speaker talks fast, about 205 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| controller noun | /kənˈtɹoʊlɚ/ | One who controls something. |
| runway noun | /ˈɹʌnweɪ/ | A defined, narrow section of land or an artificial structure used for access. |
| beacon noun | /ˈbiːkən/ | A signal fire to notify of the approach of an enemy, or to give any notice, commonly of warning. |
| instruction noun | /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/ | The act of instructing, teaching, or providing with information or knowledge. |
| proximity noun | /pɹɒkˈsɪm.ɪ.ti/ | Closeness; the state of being near in space, time, or relationship. |
| chart noun | /t͡ʃɑɹt/ | A map illustrating the geography of a specific phenomenon. |
| passenger noun | /ˈpæs.ɪn.d͡ʒɚ/ | One who rides or travels in a vehicle, but who does not operate it and is not a member of the crew. |
| realise verb | Non-Oxford British standard spelling of realize. | |
| navigation noun | /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/ | The theory, practice and technology of charting a course for a road vehicle, ship, aircraft, or spaceship. |
| collision noun | /kəˈlɪʒn̩/ | An instance of colliding. |
| investigator noun | /ɪnˈvɛs.tɪˌɡeɪ̯.təː/ | One who investigates. |
| radar noun | /ˈɹeɪˌdɑɹ/ | In full primary radar: a method of detecting a distant object and determining its position, velocity, or other characteristics by analysing radio waves… |
| airline noun | /ˈɛɹˌlaɪn/ | A company that flies airplanes to transport people and goods. |
| altitude noun | /ˈælt.ɪˌtjuːd/ | The absolute height of a location, usually measured from sea level. |
| infrastructure noun | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | An underlying base or foundation for a building, organization, or system. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| turn back verb | To reverse direction and retrace one's steps. | |
| come together verb | /ˈkʌm tʊˈɡɛðɚ/ | To assemble; to congregate; to combine. |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| set up verb | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | To make ready for use. |
| take up verb | To pick up. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was seated · were made · was killed |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've had · there's not been |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 17 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, hadn't, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: northeast /noːˈθɪjst/, northwest /nɔɹθˈwɛst/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: instruction /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/, navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/, collision /kəˈlɪʒn̩/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/, closure /ˈkloʊ.ʒɚ/
- Long words — get the stress right: proximity /pɹɒkˈsɪm.ɪ.ti/, navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/, investigator /ɪnˈvɛs.tɪˌɡeɪ̯.təː/, infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, aviation /ˌeɪ̯.viːˈeɪ̯.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like controller, runway, beacon.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.