March 27 Birthday
March 27, 1977: Two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. A KLM flight was taking off without clearance; a Pan Am flight was taxiing on the same runway in the opposite direction. The KLM pilot, Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten, the airline's most senior training captain, began his takeoff roll in thick fog without confirmation from the tower. The Pan Am crew saw the KLM plane bearing down on them and tried to turn off the runway. The KLM crew tried to rotate early. The KLM's fuselage skidded over the Pan Am's roof, then crashed 500 yards down the runway and burst into flames. 583 people died. The crash was caused by miscommunication — the KLM pilot heard "you are cleared" and believed he had takeoff clearance, when the controller had only cleared the flight route. Van Zanten's last words were, "We're going." The Good Friday earthquake struck Alaska on March 27, 1964, at 5:36 PM. Magnitude 9.2 — the largest earthquake ever recorded in the United States and the second-largest in world history. The ground shook for four and a half minutes. A 100-foot section of the Seward Highway dropped 40 feet. The earthquake triggered tsunamis that killed 131 people — 122 in Alaska, 9 in Oregon, and 4 in California. The town of Valdez was destroyed and rebuilt on higher ground. The earthquake proved the theory of plate tectonics, which had been proposed in 1960 and was still controversial. The ocean floor subduction zone that caused the quake was exactly where the theory predicted. Ponce de León sighted Florida on March 27, 1513, during the Easter season, which the Spanish called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers). He named the land La Florida. He was searching for the Fountain of Youth, according to later accounts — though the association may have been invented by his biographer to make him look foolish. He landed on the east coast and was shot by a Calusa arrow in 1521 during an attempted settlement. He died in Cuba. Florida was a Spanish territory for 285 years, with brief periods of British and then American control, until it became a US territory in 1821 and a state in 1845. Quentin Tarantino, born this day in 1963, worked at a video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California, for five years, where he watched and analyzed thousands of films. His first screenplay, True Romance (1993), was sold for $50,000. Pulp Fiction (1994) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and grossed $214 million. The non-linear narrative structure of the film — three stories told out of order, connected by a briefcase whose contents are never shown — influenced a generation of filmmakers. People born on March 27 fall under the zodiac sign of Aries. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 27 include 1513: Juan Ponce de León becomes first European to sight Florida, 1964: Good Friday earthquake strikes Alaska (magnitude 9.2, largest in US history), 1977: Tenerife airport disaster kills 583 (deadliest aviation accident in history). Famous people born on March 27 include Wilhelm Röntgen (1845), Gloria Swanson (1899), Quentin Tarantino (1963).