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cover of episode Frozen in a Burning 747 (Tenerife Air Disaster 2)

Frozen in a Burning 747 (Tenerife Air Disaster 2)

2025/1/17
logo of podcast Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

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Caroline Hopkins
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David Alexander
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Jack Rideout
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Jean Marshall Brown
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John Leach
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Robert Bragg
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Tim Harford
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Victor Grubbs
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Jean Marshall Brown: 我在飞机失事中感到死亡的感受,但随后意识到我们可以逃生,并帮助其他人逃生,最终活了下来。 我坐在座位上,时间过去了,火势越来越大,烟雾开始充满客舱,但我仍然没有动,只是坐着看着。然后我突然想到我们可以逃生,我告诉坐在我旁边的夫妇解开安全带,我们必须出去。我们爬出了破损的机身,到了机翼上。如果我再呆几秒钟,火势就会太猛烈而无法生存。 Tim Harford: 特内里费空难是航空史上最致命的空难,本集将探讨灾难发生后大脑的运作方式,以及人们在灾难中的不同反应,有些人能够迅速反应,而另一些人则会冻结。 在灾难发生后,人们的反应可能并非他们所希望的那样。许多乘客的死亡并非直接由碰撞造成,而是由于随后的火灾。最初的撞击声并没有传达事故的严重性,一些乘客在事故发生后反应冷静,直到看到周围的惨状。并非所有乘客都像Jack Rideout一样迅速采取行动。许多乘客没有尝试逃生,而是呆坐在那里。在紧急情况下,冻结是最常见的反应。 Victor Grubbs: 我目睹了撞击,并试图紧急转向避让,但飞机反应迟缓。撞击的力道出乎意料地轻微,但飞机的顶部被撞掉了。我从飞机上摔下来,并被烧伤和流血。我看到荷兰皇家航空的飞机起飞了,导致了这场事故。 我试图让飞机离开跑道,但飞机反应迟缓。我看到前方跑道上的车头灯,意识到荷兰皇家航空的飞机正在快速接近。我大喊让大家离开飞机。 Robert Bragg: 我亲眼目睹了难以置信的撞击事件,撞击的力道出乎意料地轻微,但飞机的顶部被撞掉了。我摔断了脚踝,但当时没有注意到。 我看到飞机的休息室被完全削掉了。我从驾驶舱跳下,摔倒在地。我看到荷兰皇家航空的飞机正朝我们冲过来。 Jack Rideout: 我意识到情况危急,并立即采取行动,帮助我的女朋友逃生,并帮助其他人逃生,直到火势蔓延。 我意识到情况危急,并立即采取行动。我解开安全带,并帮助我的女朋友解开安全带。我看到火势开始蔓延,并看到机身上出现了一个洞。我意识到那是逃生的方向,我将我的女朋友推了出去,然后回到机舱帮助其他人。 Warren Hopkins: 我意识到情况危急,并立即采取行动,但忘记了检查我的妻子是否和我在一起。 我解开安全带,并穿过碎片,跳出了飞机。当我落地后才意识到我忘记了我的妻子。我的妻子忘记了如何解开安全带,最终她也逃了出来,并帮我包扎伤口。 Caroline Hopkins: 我忘记了如何解开安全带,我受伤了,并帮助我的丈夫止血。 我发现自己竟然忘记了如何解开飞机上的安全带,我以为要按按钮,像在汽车里一样。最终,我想起来了,并找到了逃生的出口。我向下看,感到头晕目眩,伸手抓住东西时割伤了手。我跳了下来,肩膀着地。 John Leach: 在紧急情况下,冻结是最常见的反应,大约75%的人在紧急情况下会冻结。 冻结有两种可能的情况:一种发生在战斗或逃跑反应之前,另一种发生在战斗或逃跑不再是选择之后。在紧急情况下,如果大脑中没有合适的应对方法,人们就会冻结。 David Alexander: 我意识到我不会死,并采取行动逃生,我的行动帮助了其他人逃生。 我记得我脑子里第一个闪过的念头是:我要死了。然后另一个念头出现了:不,我不会死。我不记得接下来我做了什么,但坐在我附近的一对夫妇后来告诉我,他们看到我爬到座位后面,从天花板上的一个洞里爬了出去。他们站起来,跟着我逃出了飞机。

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This chapter recounts the events leading up to the collision of two 747s on the runway at Tenerife Airport and focuses on the survival and death of Pan Am passengers. Despite surviving the initial impact, many died in the subsequent fire.
  • The Pan Am flight had diverted to Tenerife due to a bomb threat.
  • Many passengers survived the initial impact but perished in the fire.
  • The chapter sets the stage for exploring why so many passengers who survived the initial impact died in the fire.

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Pushkin. Sometimes getting better is harder than getting sick. Waiting on hold for an appointment, standing in line at the pharmacy, the whole healthcare system can feel like a headache. Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy are changing that.

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What does it really mean to trust someone? It's a big question that affects so many areas of our lives. When people gain our trust or break our trust,

it matters. I'm Rachel Botsman, and I've been studying trust for over 15 years. In my new audiobook, we're going to learn about how trust is earned, how it's lost, and why trusting ourselves is so important. Find how to trust and be trusted at pushkin.fm forward slash audiobooks, or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks.

58-year-old Jean Marshall Brown was sitting in the cabin of a Pan American 747. She ran a travel company in La Mesa, California. She was leading a group of retired holidaymakers on a 12-day cruise of the Mediterranean. The trip hadn't got off to the best of starts. They'd had to divert to the next island over from where their cruise ship was waiting.

But now, at last, they were taxiing down the runway, ready for the final short leg of their journey, when... What on earth was that? Whatever just happened, some passengers near Jean had been killed. Over the next few minutes, the ruptured cabin of the Pan Am plane will be consumed by explosions, smoke and fire. And as Jean sits in her seat, a thought pops into her head.

This is the way it feels to die in an airplane crash. This is the second of our two-part series on the Tenerife air disaster of 1977, when two jumbo jets collided on the runway. It remains the deadliest accident in aviation history. In the previous episode, we asked why the captain of one of those airliners, operated by KLM,

mistakenly believed he'd been cleared to take off when the runway was still blocked by the taxiing Pan Am. We heard how everyone on that KLM plane died in an instant fireball as it clipped the top of the Pan Am, then scudded down the runway. But on the Pan Am plane, a lot of people survived the impact. People like Jean Marshall Brown. In this episode, like the previous one,

we'll explore a quirk of the human brain. This time, we'll look at how the brain works in the moments after disaster strikes, suddenly and unexpectedly. How would you react? It may not be how you'd hope. Jean sat in her seat. Time passed. It's hard to say how long. The fire caused by the impact grew stronger. Smoke started to fill the cabin. But Jean still didn't move.

She just sat and watched. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

Pan Am Captain Victor Grubbs and First Officer Robert Bragg have had a frustrating afternoon. They've flown through the night from New York to the Canary Islands, but just before they could land on Gran Canaria, a bomb threat closed the airport. They've had to divert to the tiny airport on the nearby island of Tenerife. When they get there, they discover lots of other planes have been diverted before them, including another 747, the KLM.

Its captain has let his passengers disembark to kill time in the terminal, which is now rammed to capacity. Grubbs has to tell his passengers to stay on their plane. He feels bad about that. Most have been on board since California. He decides to invite everyone for a tour of the cockpit and repeats the same apologetic story. I asked if we could circle in the air until they were ready, but they insisted we land here.

They've been hanging around for a couple of hours when word came through that Gran Canaria's airport is open. The KLM captain has chosen this moment to start taking on more fuel, and his plane is blocking their way to the runway. Or could they squeeze past? Captain Grubbs sends Robert Bragg and the flight engineer to pace out the distance. They come back with bad news. The tarmac is just a few feet too narrow.

They'd have to put one set of wheels on the grass, but the ground is soft and the plane weighs over 300 tonnes. They can't risk getting stuck. Grubbs is annoyed. Another delay, and now thick fog is rolling in. Are they going to be able to take off at all? He calls the KLM captain. How much longer are you going to be with that refuelling? About 20 minutes. Comes the reply...

At last, the fuel trucks depart and the KLM starts to taxi down the runway. Grubbs is told to follow them and take the third exit to the left. But it's so foggy. They take it slowly, just three miles an hour, looking at an airport map and peering through the window. Was that an exit there? On the radio, Grubbs, Bragg and the flight engineer hear the KLM plane talking to the control tower.

Sounds like they've already reached the end of the runway and turned around. We're now at take-off. Now at take-off? He'd better not try to take off yet. First Officer Bragg reaches for the radio. And we're still taxiing down the runway, the Clipper 1736. Roger, Papa Alpha 1736, report the runway clear. OK, we'll report when we're clear. So the controller now knows that they're still on the runway.

But the message from the KLM plane has made the mood in the cockpit uneasy. Where is that exit? Let's get the hell out of here, says Grubbs. Bragg and the flight engineer grumble about the KLM captain. He sounds like he's in a hurry now, after he held them up to refuel. The bastard, says one. The prick, agrees the other.

And now Grubbs says... There he is. Through the murk, Captain Grubbs has seen headlights on the runway ahead. For a moment, he seems to assume the KLM plane must be stationary, waiting at the end of the runway to be cleared to take off. Perhaps they've missed their exit and got almost to the end of the runway themselves? Hold on. Are those headlights getting closer? They are. That KLM plane is moving. It's moving quickly. It's heading straight for them.

Look at him! God damn! That son of a bitch is coming! Get off!

Get off! Get off! Grubbs and Bragg both yank their controls hard to the left. Grubbs slams the throttle open. It's clear to them both that the KLM plane won't be able to stop. All they can do is try to get their own plane off the runway. It responds to their controls, but agonisingly slowly. It weighs over 300 tonnes after all. It starts a lumbering turn towards the edge of the runway. Its speed inches up to 19 miles an hour.

The first set of wheels, just under the nose, drops off the runway and onto the grass. Bragg glances out of the window to his right. The KLM plane is right upon them. It's beginning to lift, but not high enough. He sees the red rotating beacon on its undercarriage. It's the only time in my life I have ever saw something happening that I could not believe was happening. Instinctively, Bragg and Grubbs close their eyes and duck.

The moment of impact feels surprisingly gentle. A bump and some shaking. It was a very slight impact, very slight noise. Like, that was about it. It was so minor, it was unbelievable until I opened my eyes. The first thing Bragg sees is the cockpit windows are gone. The next thing he sees is a fire on the wing to his right. He reaches up to pull the levers that will cut off the flow of fuel to the engines. The levers should be right above him on the ceiling.

but his hands are grasping at air. He looks up. The levers aren't there, nor is the ceiling. Picture a 747, that hump on the top of the fuselage near the nose. The cockpit's at the front of that hump. Behind it, on this plane, was the first-class lounge. When Bragg looks behind him, the lounge is gone, sheared away completely.

I could see all the way to the tail of the airplane, just like someone had taken a big knife and sliced the entire top of the cabin of the airplane off. Captain Grubbs is first to get out of his seat. He turns to look back at where the lounge used to be. It had 28 passengers in it. One, a woman, is lying on what's left of the floor. Grubbs walks over towards her, but before he can get there, the floor collapses under him.

First Officer Bragg gets out of his seat. There's now only about a foot of floor left behind him in the cockpit. How's he going to get out of the plane? There is one direct way out. It's 38 feet down to the ground. He grabs hold of the captain's seat to steady himself and jumps. 396 people were on board that Pan Am flight. 71 made it out, though some later died from their injuries.

At the moment of impact, the plane was angled across the runway, the result of the pilot's attempted left turn. The KLM plane lifted, but not high enough. An engine and landing gear ripped through parts of the Pan Am cabin. The passengers sitting directly in their path, such as those in the first-class lounge, never stood a chance. But what about those in other seats, who weren't in the way of the engine or the landing gear?

Could more of them have made it out alive? Why didn't they? We'll explore how the mind responds to a sudden crisis after the break.

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Today, we are bringing you a trust course brought to you by my friend Rachel Botsman. Rachel is a leading expert on trust and she's the author of the new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted. Rachel, I have a friend who I don't trust to show up on time or at all. I wouldn't lend money to him, but I would absolutely trust him to take care of my children. So is there such a thing as generic trustworthiness or is it always more specific?

Hey Tim, that's a really important question because blanket trust is rarely a good thing. Whenever we think about trust, it should be within a context, trusting someone or something to do what?

So your friend's a perfect example. You may not trust him to show up on time. He may not be reliable, but you trust him implicitly with your children. And this is one of the most powerful ways to reframe trust decisions is always to think trusting someone to do what. Thank you very much, Rachel. For more trust lessons like this one, find How to Trust and Be Trusted by Rachel Botsman on pushkin.fm slash audiobooks.

or wherever you get your audiobooks. One night in the early 1910s, the Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon woke up with a flash of inspiration. Cannon was writing a book about how emotions affect the functioning of animals' bodies. It was a new field of inquiry and he'd stumbled across it by accident when using the newly discovered technique of x-rays to study how digestion works.

Cannon experimented on cats. He'd feed them some food mixed with bismuth salts, which show up on X-rays. Then he'd tie them down and watch on the fluoroscopic screen as the food travelled down the oesophagus into the stomach. The cats, not surprisingly, sometimes took exception to being restrained. They'd cry out and struggle to get free. Cannon noticed something interesting.

Whenever a cat got distressed, the movements in the stomach entirely disappeared. I continued stroking the cat reassuringly. She became quiet and began to purr. As soon as this happened, the movements commenced again in the stomach. Cannon was intrigued. The cat's body seemed to be saying, in effect, I can't afford to waste energy on digesting food right now. I've got more important things to worry about.

What else changed about how an animal's body functions when it gets upset? Cannon found a whole range of common responses. The pulse quickens. There's a spike in blood sugar. More secretion from the adrenal glands. The book Cannon was writing is called "Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage". It became a classic, due in part to the sudden inspiration that woke him up in the night.

A clever form of words to tie together the physiological changes he'd discovered. The idea flashed through my mind that they could be nicely integrated if conceived as bodily preparations for supreme effort in flight or in fighting. Fight or flight. It's a great phrase, still in common use more than a century later.

In terms of evolution, it makes perfect sense. That's what animals typically have to do when they're in mortal peril. Either fight back or run away. We humans, too, experience that fight-or-flight suite of bodily changes in moments of sudden stress. But our first response is often not to fight or flee. Cannon's alliteration was incomplete. As we'll hear, he missed out the most common F of all.

In the cabin of Pan Am Flight 1736, the passengers haven't heard that ominous radio message from the KLM plane. We're now at take-off. Most of them haven't been looking out of a right-hand window to see the headlights approaching through the fog. As far as they're concerned, this is just a routine taxi down the runway before a routine flight.

They're yawning, chatting, reading, slipping off their shoes, arranging their bags under their seats, when, as in the cockpit, the initial noise doesn't convey the severity of what's just happened. Survivors later liken it to a snapping twig, a swarm of bees passing overhead, or a length of adhesive tape being ripped off.

One woman assumes that the shuddering thump must mean that the pilot has veered off the edge of the runway in the fog. How annoyingly careless of him. No doubt they'll have to queue up now for the emergency exits. She calmly leans forward and reaches under the seat for her handbag, puts the strap over her shoulder, gets up and looks around. Only then does she see the carnage. Blood and bodies everywhere. Some people are dead.

Some have been hurt by flying bits of metal or the overhead luggage bins collapsing on top of them. Still others are unscathed, just confused about what's happened. There'd been talk of a bomb scare at the airport. Was it a bomb? It's hard to imagine your world being torn apart like that. It's hard to guess how you'd react. We all hope we'd react like passenger Jack Rideout, a 33-year-old entrepreneur sitting in first class.

The first thing Rideout does is blurt out a call to action, seemingly as much to himself as anyone. This is it, says Rideout. He unclips his seatbelt and gets up. He sees his girlfriend next to him, struggling to get her belt undone. He helps her up, and the two find their footing in the aisle, amid the fallen contents of the overhead luggage bins. Rideout looks to the right. He sees the fire starting on the wing. He looks to the left.

He sees a hole ripped in the fuselage. He notices that the plane seems to be tilting to the left. That's the way to get out then. Further from the fire, closer to the ground. Those engines are going to blow. We've got to get out of here. The hole in the fuselage is where the emergency exit door used to be. The door has gone. So has the door frame. So is the inflatable chute that should activate when the door is opened.

All that's left is a gaping hole framed by jagged metal and a 20-foot drop to the tarmac below. The girlfriend gets to the hole, looks down and hesitates. This is no time to hesitate. Ride out, shoves her out. But he doesn't jump himself. He turns back into the cabin, telling others what to do. This way, come with me. He sees a flight attendant struggling to inflate a rubber raft

That's a good idea. It'll give people something to land on. He goes to help her. But by now, the fire's starting to spread. Oxygen canisters and fire extinguishers are exploding in the heat. A fragment of metal shoots across the cabin and hits the attendant in the head, killing her. Rideout finishes inflating the raft and hurls it through the jagged hole. He looks around for anyone else to help out of the plane.

There's an older woman, seemingly unconscious. He picks her up, but realises that she's dead already. Rideout puts the body down and decides it's time to jump to safety himself. He lands on the rubber raft.

We'd all like to hope that in a sudden crisis, we'd react like Jack Rideout. Selfless, strong, and above all, self-possessed. Rideout quickly appraised his new situation. The need to get out, the fire on the right, the hole on the left. That's the fight-or-flight response working as nature intended. A laser-like focus on the essential facts. Quick and decisive action.

But more often, things go quite differently. Our brains don't work as we'd like to hope they would. Take Warren Hopkins, 53 years old, a meat wholesaler from Illinois, and his wife, Caroline. They're also sitting in first class. In the moments after the impact, Hopkins reacted just as quickly as Jack Rideout. He touched his wife on the arm and said, Let's go.

He unbuckled his seatbelt, picked his way across the debris in the aisle and launched himself through the jagged hole in the fuselage. Only when he'd landed did he remember that he'd forgotten to check that his wife was with him. She wasn't, because Caroline had forgotten something else. How to unbuckle a seatbelt. How strange. She found herself thinking, I must have unbuckled airplane seatbelts a hundred times and I can't remember how to do it.

She later said she thought she might have been trying to press a button, like you would in a car. Eventually, she remembered how airline seat buckles unclasp and made her way to the jagged hole. She looked down and felt vertiginous. She reached out to hold something and gashed her hand. She jumped and landed awkwardly on her shoulder. Warren dragged her away.

She managed to get up and saw that a wound in his head was gushing blood over his formal white dress shirt. Warren hadn't realised. That's part of fight or flight. There's no time to feel pain. Caroline slipped off her floral patterned underskirt and wrapped it around Warren's head wound. She noticed the gash on her hand and wrapped it in a handkerchief.

Warren and Caroline Hopkins later worked with the author John Zyermek to gather recollections from fellow survivors for his book, Collision on Tenerife. Their stories of leaps, burns and broken bones, but their stories about other passengers too. Passengers who weren't making any attempt at all to get themselves free. One survivor recalled, They just didn't move.

I believe at least another 100 could have been saved, but they were sitting there, just transfixed. Another said... It was like catching a deer in your headlights. Eight decades earlier, when the Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon coined the phrase fight or flight, he missed out what may be the most important F of all. Most people on that plane didn't fight or try to flee, like Jack Rideout or Warren Hopkins...

Instead, they froze. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. We've all been there. You're sick and you're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold. Then you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people. And don't get me started about getting your prescriptions. That's a whole other story. Amazon understands. That's why they created Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, designed to remove these pain points from healthcare.

With Amazon One Medical, you get 24-7 virtual care, so you can see a provider within minutes and avoid those long, annoying waits. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your prescriptions are delivered directly to you quickly and affordably. No more trips to the pharmacy, and no more surprise costs at the cash register. Thanks to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, health care just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon.com.

Today, we are bringing you a 60-second trust course brought to you by my friend, Rachel Botsman. Rachel is a leading expert on trust, and she's the author of the new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted.

Rachel, would the world be a better place if we all trusted each other more? I love that question, Tim. Yes and no is the answer. In our local communities and neighborhoods, if we could increase trust, if people could learn how to depend on one another and connect face to face, it really could change lives.

But in other contexts, say in the way that we consume information, we actually need to learn how to slow down and make better trust decisions. So it's not always a case of more trust and more of a case of placing our trust well, making smart trust decisions.

Thank you very much, Rachel. For more trust lessons like this one, find How to Trust and Be Trusted by Rachel Botsman on pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever you get your audiobooks. John Leach is a cognitive psychologist who studies human survival. In 2004, he published a paper, Why People Freeze in an Emergency. Leach studied survivor accounts of 11 disasters.

on airplanes, oil rigs and ships. One person who got off a sinking ferry recalled how they hadn't been able to understand why others weren't trying to help themselves. They just sat there, being swamped by the water when it came in. Leach came to the startling conclusion that freezing wasn't just common, it was the most common response to disaster. It happened to about 75% of people in the cases he studied.

The classic response to danger, wrote Leach, should be restated as fight, flight or freeze. We hope we'd react like Jack Rideout. We're more likely to be deer in headlights. But what's going on when people freeze? There are two possibilities, hard to tell apart from the outside, but quite different.

Physiologists reserve the term freezing for something that happens before the fight-or-flight response. The same bodily changes are going on, the surge of adrenaline, the thumping heart. We're primed for action, but not acting yet. It's as if the body has slammed on both the accelerator and the brake at the same time. In the animal world, this can make perfect sense. You've seen a predator,

You're not sure if the predator has seen you. You stay very, very still and hope the predator goes away. If it comes for you, the brake comes off and you fight or you flee. The other freezing scenario happens after fight or flight are no longer options. You're trapped. The predator has got you. In this situation, you'll sometimes see animals stop struggling and play dead.

This too has evolutionary logic. Predators don't want to eat meat that might have been dead for a while. It could poison them, play dead and they might lose interest. It's a last, desperate roll of the dice. Physiologists call this state tonic immobility, and it seems to happen to humans too. Were some Pan Am passengers experiencing tonic immobility? We can't ask the ones who died, but it seems likely.

One survivor recalls hearing an elderly woman turn to her husband and say, I think this is it. The same words as Jack Rideout, but a different meaning. The task of getting out is, realistically, beyond us. Perhaps it was. But we can ask the passengers who froze initially, before the brakes came off and fight or flight kicked in. Remember Jean Marshall Browne?

This is the way it feels to die in an airplane crash. She found herself thinking before she sat and watched the cabin fill with smoke around her. And then another thought popped into Jean's head. We can get out of here. That thought unfroze her. Jean turned to the couple sitting next to her, who were also deer in headlights. Unfasten your seatbelts, she told them. We've got to get out. They clambered out of the broken fuselage and onto the wing.

We can't know for sure how long Jean was frozen, but she thinks they were the last ones out. If she'd stayed frozen for another few seconds, the fire would have been too intense to survive. It already was for the couple she had roused. They jumped from the wing, but died from their burns. Jean spent two months in hospital and lived. What can snap you out of a freeze? Jean Marshall Brown's story suggests there are two things –

A thought popping into your head or someone else showing you the way? Gene's story was mirrored elsewhere on the airplane. David Alexander was 29 years old, an amateur photographer. He later wrote a book about his experience called Never Wait for the Fire Truck. Just like Gene, David Alexander remembers the first thought to cross his mind. I am going to die. Then along came another thought. No, I'm not.

Alexander doesn't remember what he did next. Not forming memories is another common feature of the fight-or-flight response. But a couple sitting near him later told him what he did and how it made them realise what they too had to do. They saw him climb up onto the back of his seat and clamber his way out of a hole in the ceiling. They got up from their seats and followed his route out of the plane.

The psychologist John Leach says that when people freeze in an emergency, it's because their memory contains no appropriate response for their brain to latch onto. And as stress hormones flood their brains, they can't come up with one. Their thinking is sluggish, their reasoning impaired. If you know there's a particular kind of emergency you might encounter...

You can train for it. Do drills, again and again, until the right response pops straight into your brain. That makes sense for soldiers or pilots. See a fire on the wing, reach above you for the levers that cut off the fuel to the engine. But most of us aren't likely ever to be in an airplane crash or a sinking ferry. Training again and again for specific emergencies isn't a wise use of our time.

So what can we do to reduce the likelihood that we freeze if disaster strikes? The best advice is boringly predictable. Don't ignore the in-flight safety briefing. But the experience of Jean Marshall Brown and David Alexander tells us why we should pay attention, even if we've heard it a hundred times before. In a sudden disaster, you can't predict which thoughts will flash into your mind. I'm going to die or we can get out of here.

If you've recently said to yourself, my nearest emergency exit is three rows behind, maybe that thought will pop into your head. It might be enough to save you. Years after the crash, Jack Rideout talked to a journalist at the Los Angeles Times. He was, of course, haunted by flashbacks. But the most disturbing memory? Not when he exclaimed, this is it. Not the flight attendant being killed by shrapnel while trying to inflate the rubber raft.

not shoving his girlfriend through the jagged hole in the fuselage. What kept coming back to him, said Rideout, was seeing all those people, not harmed, but not doing anything, just looking calmly ahead. Hundreds of them, he thought. They could all have got out. Hundreds. An exaggeration, surely, but perhaps not by much.

Investigators later tried to piece together how many people had died in the collision and how many survived the impact but died in the fire. They did this by seeing if the bodies had soot in the trachea. That would indicate they'd still been breathing as smoke filled the cabin. Almost half the bodies were too badly burned to tell either way. Of the others, they found 60 without soot. They'd been killed before the fire took hold.

But almost twice as many, 118, did have soot in the trachea. These people had survived the crash, then died in the inferno. Some no doubt had been knocked unconscious or injured too badly to move. But others, it seemed, simply froze until they burned. First officer Robert Bragg falls 38 feet and rolls on the grass. He's broken an ankle, but he doesn't notice that.

Captain Victor Grubbs tumbles through the floor into the main first-class seating area, then falls through that floor too into the cargo hold. He sees a hole ripped in the side of the hold and wriggles towards it. He drops onto the tarmac and lies there, burned and bleeding. Someone comes towards him. It's one of the flight attendants. He looks at her. What have I done to these people? She slips a hand under his arm.

Crawl, Captain. Crawl. Grubbs drags himself away from the fiery wreckage. He finds Robert Bragg. They get to their feet. A passenger approaches them. It's Warren Hopkins, wearing one shoe, a blood-soaked white dress shirt, and his wife's floral-patterned underskirt wrapped around his head. What in the hell happened? That crazy bastard did it. The KLM took off.

He was supposed to be holding and he took off. They watch as fire and explosions consume what's left of the Pan Am 747. It makes no sense, but they got out. By now, for anyone else who could have, it's too late. An important source for this episode was Collision on Tenerife, the how and why of the world's worst aviation disaster by John Zyermek and Caroline Hopkins.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Coercionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Litao Mollard, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com.

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