Georgia Hardstark
speaker
4,112 appearances
38 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Georgia Hardstark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark · 467 - Nipper & The Hat · 13 Feb 2025
podcast
And among the Dutch passengers are several tour guides who are from the Netherlands originally, but now most live on the Canary Islands. And they're coming with the group to the Canary Islands. Among them is a young woman in her 20s named Robina van Lanschot. Both flights land at Los Rodeos around 2 p.m. You know, they'd been diverted, as I keep telling you.
The passengers from the Dutch KLM flight are allowed off the plane and into the airport while they wait, which is kind of crowded, but at least they get off the plane. And it's here that Robina makes a split-second decision. See, her boyfriend, like newish boyfriend, lives on Tenerife, where they had to land, where they were diverted. So she decides to stay on the island and go see him.
She's close friends with the other two Dutch tour guides on the flight. She tries to convince them to, like, come with her. We'll make a night out of it. We'll have some fun. But they've already made plans to see friends on Gran Canaria. And so they're like, we're just going to wait till we're allowed to get back on the plane and go back to the island.
Like, they want to get this whole trip over with. Yeah. So the passengers on the Pan Am flight from L.A., they have to stay on the plane, unfortunately. Nearly all of them had departed from Los Angeles and they had already made that stop in New York. So at this point, they've all been traveling for about 12 hours. You know, probably really shitty conditions back in the 70s. Right.
Lots of cigarettes. Lots of smoking. Lots of cigarette smoke. They're anxious to complete this final 25-minute leg of their trip. They're like, can we get this over with? Among these passengers is a 27-year-old woman named Joni Holt. Joni is a former police officer and has a three-year-old daughter back home in San Diego. She's divorced and in a relatively new relationship with a man named Jack.
And she and Jack are about to go on this trip of a lifetime together in this new relationship they're in. They're going on a two-week cruise through the Mediterranean. And actually a large proportion of the passengers on that flight are supposed to go on the same cruise. It's scheduled to leave from Gran Canaria and make stops in the Canary Islands, Morocco, Sicily, Athens.
Like everyone is just ready for this flight to be over so they can move on with their lives. Yeah. So Joni and her boyfriend have splurged on first-class tickets for the flight, and the luxurious Pan Am 747 has a first-class bar area on the upper deck. Wow. That upper deck you love. At this point on the journey, Joni and her boyfriend have befriended their seatmates, something I don't ever do.
No, God no. You shouldn't. Once they've been diverted to Tenerife, some of those seatmates invite them upstairs to the lounge to hang out. But Joni and Jack decide to stay downstairs in their seats. They're just like, they want to be where they're supposed to be when the flight's supposed to take off. Like they're ready to freaking go. Yeah. So they don't go upstairs to the bar.
Remember that flight to Australia that had a bar in it? You won't remember that, but Vince and I remember that.
Yeah. Yeah. So First Class has a dedicated crew, and among them on the Pan Am flight are best friends Suzanne Donovan and Joan Jackson. These two young women try to coordinate so that they work on the same flights together. That's how much they enjoy each other's company. So...
At about 5 p.m., the Grand Canaria Airport has been secured and reopened, and so flights are allowed to begin taking off for that 25-minute journey. Now, the two air traffic controllers are going to have to play a game of Tetris to move all these unexpected planes around to give them space to take off down that one small runway that they have.
Then, at the same time, one of these other fucking bits of chance happens. A thick fog begins to roll in. I know. Fucking fog. The airport is 2,000 feet above sea level, which you know means it's prone to thick cloud cover at times. And there's another issue. The center lights on the runway aren't working. Crucial.
At this point, everyone has been stranded at Los Rodeos for about three hours. They're anxious to get into the air. In addition to this, the Dutch KLM crew is in danger of timing out, which basically means that everyone working that flight would have to stay a certain amount of hours at that airport before they're allowed to fly again. And there's not room for that on the island.
They're all fucking over it. They just kind of are in a hurry in a way they wouldn't be normally. And so because of this, maybe not everyone is thinking every step through. The air traffic controllers instruct the KLM flight to taxi to the end of the runway. And then they're supposed to wait for the Pan Am flight to follow behind it and get behind it to take off after it.
All the other planes at the airport are on the taxi or a holding area because these are the two big planes. But there's interference and the radio transmissions aren't clear. There's also the language barrier issue. All of the communications are being done in English, but the air traffic controllers and the KLM pilots don't have a standard aviation-centered knowledge of the language.
The air traffic controller's first language is Spanish. The KLM flight crew's first language is Dutch. And so the two groups are just not working with a standardized aviation English vocabulary, just the limited amount of English that they both happen to know. So obviously things are going to get mixed up.
The Dutch-speaking pilots on the KLM flight taxi to the end of the runway, as they're supposed to, and then Captain Van Zanten says, okay, we are at takeoff. And then the air traffic controllers say, OK, standby for takeoff. I will call you. But because of the radio interference, only the OK is audible in the KLM cockpit. So no one had actually given the KLM flight clearance to take off.
But Captain Van Zanten must have misunderstood as he initiates takeoff. He basically goes down the runway. They have to do a U-turn. And they're supposed to wait for the other flight to go down and go behind it. But it's still driving down the runway. Right. They're like basically facing each other. The transmissions are choppy.
And in the Pan Am flight that's still taxiing down the runway, they don't hear everything, but they still say, quote, we're still taxiing down the runway. But this transmission overlaps with one from air traffic control. And in the KLM cockpit, they only hear high-pitched noise as their plane barrels directly at the Pan Am flight, which they can't see through that dense fog.
So it's just barreling towards this other plane. Yeah. While all this is going on, the passengers in first class on the Pan Am flight, they're kind of aware of what's going on. Joni remembers feeling nervous about the maneuvering that they had to do around the KLM flight. She remembers that her boyfriend joked, quote, don't worry, if they hit us, you won't feel a thing, end quote.
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