Mayday‪!‬ Air Historian

I’m one of those people that can’t get enough of air disaster podcasts. These guys do a solid job of choosing the most interesting stories to cover and share their very human reactions to them. Took me a few listens to get used to the more conversational and casual style of storytelling versus some of the other air disaster podcasts but I’ve come around.

I started listening the Tenerife disaster episode, loved the style a lot but around the end of the first part they add very innacurate data (not specific details but well documented ones) and got personally offended by some of the comments so obviously, that makes me wonder if the rest of the episodes are as biased as this one. I was born in the same town where it happened, same year and you talk about the place with such a contempt that is very surprising and far away from what a well documented historian would do. You narrate the episode in a way that I find very offensive, I understand one tends to have more sympathy for their own because they can relate (maybe that's why I felt this way listening to it) so I clearly understand you tend to have more affinity with the american victims but there were no winners here. This is not a tale of the "american hero saves the day". The part where you start to talk about victims having to wait for 2 weeks for an american surgeon to arrive to receive proper treatment is just disgusting and absolutely false. There's a big university hospital in the area that even at the time, was reference in the country. Every surgeon/doctor/specialist at the island, on call/off call was inmediatly available to these people as soon as they arrived to the hospital. I know because my grandfather was one of them. Even if they had to bring extra staff, which wasn’t the case, they were not 4 hours away by ship, the trip could be done in a fast ferry in 30-40 min and helicopters flight between places frequently so I’m sure if such an skilled person was needed he/she would’ve been here in just a couple of hours. The people who recovered the bodies were mostly young men doing mandatory militar service (most of them 18 year olds with no experience in anything, many ended up commiting suicide in the coming years). The controller was not sent here because he was bad at his work or because this is a remote area(one of the main european tourism hubs, even at the time). The airport is actually one of the most difficult in the country to land (is easy to see if you do a quick google search to see why the landscape is so problematic) so they tend to send the most skilled ones but even so, no, the process in Spain for controllers and their destinations does not work like that (the football match theory has been proved wrong all the time but you center the whole end of the episode around it). The man worked until the 2000's when he retired after being found innocent of any wrong doing in all investigations. You talk about this airport in the 70's as if it was the present were all types of aircraft land safely and large modifications where put in place during the years, the reason is still mostly a domestic airport is because another airport was built closer to touristic spots, not because is unsafe. This accident left my hometown deeply wounded even to this day and even though I understand how far this falls far from you, phisically and emotionally, I still think if you are doing a podcast where you call yourself historian, youshould laid out facts not free interpretations, I liked your style a lot but I can’t hear a new episode without wondering how much you are changing the facts to make it more appealing and shocking to the listener who does not know anything about it.

This podcast is really great! I watched a lot of yt videos on plane crashes but it’s nice to have a podcast on it!