Galveston County Daily News, June 10, 2007 GALVESTON -- On a foggy runway at an airport on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, the pilot of a KLM 747 prepared for takeoff despite concerns from his crew and confusion about whether the plane had clearance. As the KLM flight came out of the fog, cockpit crewmembers saw before them a Pan American 747, also attempting to take off. The KLM plane was going too slowly to fly and too fast to stop. The Boeings collided; 583 people died. The Tenerife tragedy on March 27, 1977, holds the gruesome title of the world's deadliest aviation accident. Nearly three decades later, at 1:25 p.m. on Feb. 22, 2003, doctors at Duke University Medical Center pronounced Jesica Santillan, 17, brain dead. Surgeons had mistakenly performed a heart-and-lung transplant on Santillan from a donor with the wrong blood type. While not obvious, the two events have things in common. Human error, for one, and failure of subordinates to aggressively question the judgment of high-ranking superiors. Tenerife and airline crashes like it inspired federally required changes and checklists in the ego-driven world of airline pilots. Some say those changes have made commercial aviation safer. Now doctors and hospitals are trying to apply those cockpit procedures to critical care. The University of Texas Medical Branch is among a growing number of U.S. health institutions hiring pilots and aviation-industry consultants to change the way employees think about safety and patient care.  About 14 months ago, the medical branch hired Memphis-based consulting firm LifeWings to do the job. Medical branch officials say there was nothing startling about its safety record. In fact, the hospital system, where 15,000 surgeries are performed each year, was "pretty safe," they say. But they were motivated by high-profile cases of doctors amputating healthy limbs and a growing body of reports about deadly medical mistakes nationwide. The health-care industry took a beating after a 1999 Institute of Medicine report, "To Err is Human," which estimated that at least 44,000 - and possibly 98,000 - people die of preventable medical errors each year.