It was 1977 Teneree Fairport in the Canary Islands. It was foggy, the radios were busy, heavy traffic.

Two jumbo jets, Boeing 747s were on the runway. One was taxing across, the other was powering up for takeoff.

The pilot thought he had clearance. He didn't.

The KLM aircraft accelerated straight into the path of the Pan Am jet. They collided and

583 people were killed. It's still the deadliest aviation accident in history and it wasn't

the fog that caused it or the runway or even the aircraft.

The KLM pilot was under pressure. From what I understand, he was worried about timing out,

exceeding the hours allowed under the Dutch flight regulations. He was focused on one thing,

getting that plane into the air, so focused that he missed the warnings, he misheard the

radio, and he couldn't see what was right in front of him. That's called cognitive narrowing,

and that's at the heart of this deep trouble story today. It's a phenomenon well known to fighter pilots.

They're trained specifically to recognize it and break out of it because

that kind of mental tunnel vision can get people killed. But it's not just in the cockpits or high

adrenaline emergencies. In fact, you may have experienced this yourself. Maybe in a crisis or an

accident, something goes wrong and your world suddenly shrinks. Your vision narrows. You fixate on one

thing and everything else

seems to just disappear. As motorcyclists, we run into this more often than we realize. For instance,

target fixation. You look at an object that you want to avoid, a rock or a rut, and you find

yourself riding straight into it. That's a form of cognitive narrowing. And it doesn't always

come on suddenly. Sometimes it

creeps in gradually over hours or even days. You get fixated on reaching a goal or keeping a trip from

falling apart. You start to justify decisions that don't quite add up. You push through, even though

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