Answer to Map #98
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Answer: This week’s map, which was created by David P., depicted the sites of the 500 deadliest plane crashes in world history. The large red dots indicate the sites of plane crashes that killed more than 1,000 people. The orange dots are for plane crashes that killed more than 500 people and the yellow dots for crashes that killed more than 300 people. You can find a handy list of the deadliest air disasters here.
As we mentioned in the week’s hints, one of the 500 deadliest crashes actually isn’t on this map. That’s because the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared over the Indiana Ocean in March 2014, has never been found. We don’t know where to put the dot!
There are two large red dots in New York City; on this map, they overlap completely, though in real life they are actually a few feet apart. Those dots represent the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The towers were destroyed when hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 into the towers, which subsequently collapsed. Estimates put the death toll from those crashes at 1,700 and 1,000, respectively. All passengers on the plane were killed, but the majority of the fatalities were people on the ground.
The large orange dot in the Canary Islands refers to the deadliest aviation disaster if you count only airplane passengers among the fatalities. In March 1977, a Pan Am flight and a KLM flight collided on the runway of the airport in Tenerife, killing 560 people. The airport was hemmed in by thick fog when the KLM flight initiated its takeoff, with the pilot not realizing that the Pan Am plane was still blocking its path on the runway. 61 passengers in the front part of the Pan Am plane survived the crash.
So far, the deadliest aviation disaster of 2018 has been the crash of an Algerian military jet near Boufarik, Algeria, in April, killing 257 people.
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