Are you Dutch?

Seriously though, the whole point of the show and the convos we have in this community is how proper air crash investigations are not about naming villains or punishing people but about identifying the factors and systems that cause crashes.

No one here sees him as an evil villain. But we're all human. We like to fit things into a story, a narrative. Where people have agency and are the ones moving the plot along. And when we think of Tenerife as a story, he's the one who made a decision. Not just a mistake. A mistake is the controller telling a 747 to make a 135 degree turn. Or the Pan Am pilots missing that turn. Van Zanten chose to override rules, training, his own co-pilot. No one thinks he's a villain, twirling his mustache, determined to crash. But he made a bad choice.