AVIATION: ...What's he doing? He'll kill us all!'

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If someone had been seated just one row forward, he might have lived instead of died. If there had been no terrorist bombing at Las Palmas. If the KLM plane had not refueled, would its lighter weight have provided a lifesaving extra lift? If KLM had waited just 30 seconds more to take off. If Pan Am had moved a bit faster to its exit—or slower.

But for the tragic victims of Tenerife, there were no ifs. For their surviving families, the ifs were only agony. The reality came home at week's end in brown wooden boxes, flown to Holland and Delaware's Dover Air Force Base in cargo jets. Now it was up to the professional investigators to deal with both the ifs and the realities of aviation's worst disaster.