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Remarkably, of 396 passengers and crew aboard the Pan Am jumbo, 61 survived, including all five people in the cockpit -- the three-man crew and two off-duty employees riding in the jump seats. (Among the dead were Eve Meyer, ex-wife of the filmmaker Russ Meyer.)

Over the past few years, I've been fortunate enough to meet two of those survivors, and to hear their stories firsthand. I say that nonchalantly, but this is probably the closest I've ever come to meeting, for lack of a better term, a hero. (OK, in June 1984, I played a star-struck game of Frisbee in a parking lot with Bob Mould, but that's not the same.) Romanticizing the fiery deaths of 583 people is akin to romanticizing war -- something that always repulsed me -- but there's a certain mystique to the Tenerife disaster, a gravity so strong that shaking these survivors' hands produced a feeling similar to that of a little kid meeting his favorite baseball player. These men were there, emerging from the wreckage of what, for some of us, was an event of mythic proportions.

I was introduced to Jack Rideout in New York in the summer of 2004, where I'd been invited for the taping of a National Geographic special. At Tenerife, Rideout had been sitting in coach with his girlfriend, who also made it out. After the impact, he helped save several others, pushing them through an emergency exit before jumping to safety. After his release from the hospital, a photograph of Rideout -- bandaged, but without critical injuries -- appeared in several newspapers.

Despite it all, Rideout would soon fly again, without serious fear. His business career continued to take him around the country and abroad.

The second survivor I met was Bob Bragg, the Pan Am first officer. I met him in Los Angeles last summer, on the set of a documentary being made for the Discovery Channel about the 30th anniversary of the accident.

It was Bragg who had uttered, "And we're still taxiing down the runway" -- seven easy words that should have saved the day, but instead were lost forever in the shriek and crackle of a blocked transmission. Just thinking about it gives me the chills, but there's nothing dark about Bob Bragg -- nothing that, on the surface, feels moored to the nightmare of '77. He's one of the most easygoing people you'll ever meet. Gray-haired, bespectacled and articulate, he looks and sounds like what he is: a retired airline pilot.

God knows how many times he has recounted the collision to others. He speaks about the accident with a practiced ease, in a voice of modest detachment, as if he'd been a spectator watching from afar. Of course, the story needs no hyperbole to be terrifying. If anything, Bragg's ungarnished narrative makes it even more so. As do the strange and astounding details that normally don't make it into the interviews and TV shows. You can read all the transcripts, pore over the findings, watch the documentaries a hundred times over. Not until you sit with Bob Bragg and hear the unedited account do you get a full sense of what happened. The basic story is well known; it's the ancillaries that make it moving -- and surreal.

Bragg describes the initial impact as little more than "a bump and some shaking." All five men in the cockpit, located at the forward end of the 747's distinctive upper-deck hump, saw the KLM jet coming, and had ducked. Knowing they'd been hit, Bragg instinctively reached upward in an effort to pull the "fire handles" -- a set of four overhead-mounted levers that cut off the supply of fuel, air, electricity and hydraulics running to and from the engines. His arm groped helplessly. When he looked up, the ceiling was gone.

Turning around, he realized that the entire upper deck had been sheared off at a point about two feet aft of his chair. He could see all the way back to the tail, 200 feet behind him. The fuselage was shattered and burning. He and Capt. Grubbs were alone in their seats, on a small, fully exposed perch 35 feet above the ground. Everything around them had been lifted away like a hat. Only the two seats, the forward instrument panel, and a couple of feet of sidewall remained. The second-officer and jump-seat stations, their occupants still strapped in, were hanging upside-down through what used to be the ceiling of the first-class cabin.

There was no option other than to jump. Bragg stood up, put one hand on the back of the captain's seat, and hurled himself over the side. He landed in the grass below, feet first, and miraculously suffered little more than an injured ankle. Grubbs followed, and he too was mostly unharmed. (The others from the cockpit would unfasten their belts and shimmy down the sidewalls to the main cabin floor before similarly leaping to safety.)

Once on the ground, they faced a deafening roar. The plane had been pancaked into the grass, but because the cockpit control lines were severed, the engines were still running at full power. It took several moments before the motors began coming apart. Bragg remembers one of the engines' huge forward turbofans detaching from its shaft, falling forward onto the ground with a thud.

The fuselage was engulfed by fire. A number of passengers, most of them seated in forward portions of the cabin, had made it onto the craft's left wing, and were standing at the leading edge, about 20 feet off the ground. Bragg ran over, encouraging them to jump. At least one person was badly hurt when he inadvertently tumbled against a searing hot engine nacelle. A few minutes later, the plane's center fuel tank exploded, propelling a plume of flames and smoke a thousand feet into the sky.

The airport's ill-equipped rescue team, meanwhile, was over at the KLM site, the first wreckage they'd come to after learning there'd been a crash. They hadn't yet realized that two planes were involved, one of them with survivors. Eventually, authorities opened the airport perimeter gates, urging anybody with a vehicle to drive toward the crash scene to help. Bragg tells the cracked story of standing there in fog, surrounded by stunned and bleeding survivors, watching his plane burn, when suddenly a taxicab pulls up out of nowhere.

Bragg returned to work a few months later. He eventually transferred to United when that carrier took over Pan Am's Pacific routes in the late 1980s, and retired from the company as a 747 captain. Today he lives in Virginia with his wife, Dorothy.

Of the other survivors, not a lot is known. Like those from the Titanic or veterans of World War I, their ranks have steadily thinned over the years. Many of the Pan Am passengers were senior citizens at the time, on their way to a Mediterranean cruise. Either way, they are mostly gone now. (Jack Rideout remembers older passengers sitting fast in their seats following the impact, conscious and alert, yet making no efforts to escape.) Capt. Grubbs and the Pan Am second officer passed away some years ago.

On March 27, a memorial was dedicated overlooking the Tenerife airport to honor those who perished there. The sculpture is in the shape of a helix. "A spiral staircase," says the foundation's Web site, "... a symbol of infinity." Maybe, but I'm greatly disappointed that the more obvious physical symbolism is ignored: Early-model 747s like those in the crash were well known for the set of spiral stairs connecting their main and upper decks. In the minds of millions of international travelers, that stairway became and remains an icon of civil aviation.

I'd like to tell you there will never be another Tenerife. Alas, for as long as there are airplanes, there will occasionally be terrible accidents, and some of them will occur on the ground. At the same time, there is plenty we can do to reduce the frequency at which those accidents occur. After several would-be Tenerife sequels, including a close call in 1999 between two 747s at Chicago-O'Hare, and another near miss two years ago at Boston-Logan involving an Aer Lingus A330 and a US Airways 737, the subject of "runway incursions," to use the industry jargon, is receiving more attention than ever in airline and air traffic control training programs. Most large airports nowadays are equipped with ground tracking radar, and several have installed innovative lighting systems designed to keep crews from inadvertently crossing active runways or taxiways. An emerging, satellite-based technology known as ADS-B can provide pilots with a detailed view of surrounding ground traffic, while inexpensive units are available for VHF radios that inhibit a pilot or controller from transmitting onto an already busy frequency. Getting airlines to adopt the latter has been slow going, but the hardware is standard now in the latest radio equipment.

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During the Discovery Channel shoot, I traveled with Bob Bragg and the producers to the aircraft storage yards at Mojave, Calif., where he was interviewed alongside a mothballed 747. You can see him in this photograph, describing that incredible leap from the upper deck.

The day before, using a flight deck mock-up, director Phil Desjardins filmed a reenactment of the Tenerife collision, with a trio of actors sitting in as the KLM crew. The actors, who in the end did an excellent job, had studied the script well, but it was apparent during rehearsal that none had much understanding of airline flying or how to operate a jetliner's controls. (Like many people intimate with airline flying, I'm quick to criticize the heavy-handed portrayals cooked up by Hollywood, but by the time Desjardins called "cut" for the seventh time, for a scene only 15 seconds long, I had a new appreciation for his art.)

At one point, to provide the actors with a helpful demo, it was suggested that Bragg and I get inside the mock-up and run through a practice takeoff. A good idea. Bragg took the captain's seat, and I took the first officer's seat. We read through a makeshift checklist and went through the motions of a simulated takeoff. That's when I looked across, and all of a sudden it hit me:

Here's Bob Bragg, lone surviving pilot of Tenerife, sitting in a cockpit, pretending to be Jacob van Zanten, whose error made the whole thing happen.

Surely Bragg wants no part of this twisted karma, and I hadn't the courage to make note of it out loud -- assuming it hadn't already dawned on him. But I could barely keep the astonishment to myself. One more creepy irony in a story so full of them, even after 30 long years.

Note: Certain portions of this article, mostly at the beginning (and definitely improved upon), appeared in a previous article of mine, written for Salon under the name "P. Smith" in 2002 (prior to "Ask the Pilot").

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