Gotta love spending time looking for "fresh meat/meat products/delicacies" on the map 9:58 and then calling it bs so switching to find "groceries" :D

Tenerife airport disaster is an absolute mad one for anyone interested in plane crashes. It was as if everything that could go wrong went wrong: planes had been diverted because of a bomb threat on another island, the weather was terrible, the football match, miscommunication over the word ok due to language barrier, apparent cockiness of one of the pilots. There were so many ways that it could have been avoided and it went wrong at every single event in the sequence.

"Was there a shooting in Chicago?" No...not since lunchtime, at least.

As a Czech guy, seeing you trying to find "čerstvé maso" (fresh meat), "masové výrobky" (meat products) and "lahůdky" (delicatessen) on the map was hilarious 😂 Edit. Oh, and then you realised and started searching for "potraviny" (groceries) :Dddd

Guy misses the 6 foot letters that say "Tenerife norte" yet insta plonks tenerife airport, nice :)

Tom telling us that he's alive gives me the same vibe as when he checks if he's recording

"Terrible stuff, um.... But, that was cool!" Love it lmao

cool fact about the tenerife disaster: only one person from the KLM flight (the one that was taking off) survived. her name is Robina van Lanschot. she was travelling with her two friends, Walter and Yvonne. what's tragic is she remembers her friend Walter commenting on how something didn't feel right upon deboarding the plane, seeing all the other planes surrounding them and boxing them in. after the KLM passengers were taken into the terminal to stretch their legs and relax, Robina came up with a plan. her fiancé lived on the island their plane was diverted to, and not wanting to waste time flying to their intended destination just to take a flight back to this very airport, she chose to break the rules and stay behind while everyone else reboarded the aircraft. it was this decision to break the rules that saved her life, as everyone on the plane, including Walter and Yvonne, perished. she is now married to the very same man that indirectly saved her life, and has been for decades.

The Waco one wasn't the Waco I was expecting it to be.

The airport literally said "Tenerife Norte" :D On the accident, I'd recommend the video by Mentour Pilot on YT. It's an intruiging story and shows what a perfect storm needs to happen for such a disaster... Also I remeber some statistic that basically 90+% of airplane accidents happen during landing or takeoff

Please do more of these - love the combination of Geoguesser and history learning

Playing "Kansas - Carry on Wayward Son", while searching in Kansas - these are the kinds of details we have come to know and love from GW!

Every engineer has heard of the Hyatt colapse during their studies. A very well known mistake originating from a simple free body diagram done wrong.

the music by Chicago and Kansas while in Chicago and Kansas was a nice touch, Tom

I love the juxtaposition between "tragic and disturbing" and "PLAY ALONG" in the title

The sadness the overwhelmed now that there is no reason for Tom to check if he’s recording is immeasurable.

20:20 The Kyshtym nuclear disaster was supposedly an inspiration for the Strugatski brothers, writers, who wrote a book "Roadside Picnic" in 1972, then in 1979 it got filmed by famous russian film direcotor Andrei Tarkovsky, and he had the Strugatski brothers work on the film with him, called "Stalker", and then later in 2007 an Ukrainian studio made a game somewhat based on the book and the movie, but instead of it being inspired by the Kyshtym disaster, it was rather inspired by Chernobyl disaster, which happened in 1986, atleast 7 years before the film adaptation... and also named it Stalker ( Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl ), and 2 more games in 2008 and 2009, and the game trilogy is very famous today, still played by many fans nowadays

The Chernobyl disaster was first "revealed" to the world when workers at a Swedish nuclear facility suddenly got very high readings on their radiation safety equipment. The upper level winds blew the contaminated air towards Northern Sweden, where a lot of it fell down. I think it was 5-6 days until the Soviets admitted what had happened.

Tom: "This looks like Chicago. Has there been a shooting?" Every day, Tom. Every day.

Hey, I work in Crown Center (first location). Semi-relatedly, a couple of my neighbors died in that walkway collapse. One day they were just...gone. Their house stood empty for months. I was just a kid at the time so I didn't really understand what had happened, but it's very tragic stuff.

INSTANTLY guessed the Tenerife airport one. The deadliest air traffic disaster to date. I'm actually surprised Tom didn't know about it.

13:25 - "We could be on Tenerife..." - Yeah, I think the big sign saying "Tenerife Norte" might be a clue. 😄

At 16:42 I am genuinely amazed at the human brain's ability to read total blurs. I also successfully read that as ".dk" on my playthrough (I later moved along in Google Maps to check), reaching a similar conclusion that this totally didn't look like Denmark. But it's also the case that that blur totally *doesn't* say ".dk" in any real, rational way, but we read it anyway.

Good catch on the Waco one. I would have assumed it was the Branch-Davidians.

I was 14 years old, waiting to fly from Heathrow airport with my mother when we heard the news of the Tenerife disaster. The subject of our conversation was rapidly changed by her to something else and we never mentioned it again that day, or ever again as far as I remember. Not that we didn't sympathise, but we wanted to keep our nerve during our own flight

I love that you said Waco was midwestern. About as accurate as saying Gibraltar is in Scotland and you were just so confident about it.

Just fyi 13:24, it says Tenerife Norte on the airport building. It's bit funny timing wise since it comes just after he speculatively says Tenerife. Great video! Very interesting learning about the disasters.

Hearing you say something that happened in my lifetime was “long ago in the past” is making me feel really old. 😢

I love the musical easter eggs you put in your videos, like the 8-bit version of If You Leave Me Now while you search through Chicago.

As an aviation nerd the second I saw it say Binter (the airline of the canaries) on the airport I knew it was the Canary Islands so it had to be the Tenerife disaster

Love the nods to the bands Chicago and Kansas (and maybe more I missed) during the fast forward moments 😂

Oh ya, there’s a number of videos about that walkway collapse. It’s the third deadliest structure collapse in the U.S., with the others being an intentional collapse (9/11) and a factory collapse in 1860. So you could say it’s the most deadly accidental structural collapse in the US in the last 150 years. (Or perhaps ever, the exact death toll for the 1860 collapse isn’t know.) So ya, that’s a pretty major one. Reportedly had quite an effect on Kansas City for years after.

Was there a plane crash, he says. Only one of the biggest in history! Haha. Seriously though, the Tenerife disaster is why air traffic control and pilots now speak so rigidly, and more specifically, why we can NEVER use the words "take off" unless giving a take off instruction. Edit: for clarities sake - Basically, the Pan Am was taxiing back down the runway, in reverse direction to the direction of take off. The KLM 747 was holding at the other end. KLM wanted to leave, controller told them something like "do not take off yet", KLM captain took it as a takeoff instruction and went. As they thundered through the fog, they gained visibility of the Pan Am (and the same in reverse, the Pan Am captain applying full power to try to taxi off in time) and tried to rotate (lift off) early to clear the Pan Am. Not a viable option; the wheels and lower fuselage smashed through the Pan Am. KLM, now airborne but basically just flying via momentum, crashed back to earth very quickly after. Also, it did say Tenerife on the outside of the airport terminal. First place to look, surely?

okay there's definitely an energy to playing this video in the background while doing other tasks and hearing you say crown center and realizing you are literally in my city. thought you were doxxing me for a second there, tom 🤣🤣🤣

I watch plenty of disaster minidocumentaries on KZfaq so had seen several videos on the first and third one. Tenerife airport disaster is so widely known in aviation nerd circles that was surprised you hadn't heard of it, but that just shows how much we underestimate the general populations knowledge of anything we're interested in. I think every aviation disaster channel has made their own video on Tenerife, many with their own viewpoints on it. But the core is very much the same. - terrorist attack forced a bunch of planes to divert into a small airport that wasn't ready for it - fog made it impossible for ATC to verify who's on the runway, they didn't have ground radar - one plane was on runway longer than expected due to missed runway exit - a crew tired of waiting mistook after takeoff instructions for a takeoff clearance - two radio calls at the same time interfered with each other and neither was received With modern technology we'll hopefully never see such disaster again, but never know, if we go the route Musk wants and we get rockets flying around with hundreds of people in them, that might cause a bigger one someday.

I’ve never heard of these disasters so you’re certainly not alone. Wild stuff

I was screaming at the TV when you kept scrolling past “Tenerife North” in massive letters on the airport 😂

love the "Chicago" music while searcing chicago lol

as a Slovak guy, I really enjoyed you looking for Lahodky or Potraviny on the map 😂 Great vids, cant wait for the straight line mission Tom

I have played Japan and there is coverage in Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures of downed power lines, huge tsunami puddles, destroyed buildings with windows blown out. It is only obvious in the 2011 and 2013 coverage, but it is a meta you can use.

9:50 Btw čerstvé maso = fresh meat, Masové výrobky = Meat Products, Lahodky = delicatessen, It's fun to see you search for it on the map :)

Your local mate from east London made at least 3 (maybe 4) episodes about these incidents, I highly recommend his “Plainly Difficult” channel to watch here on youtube. Hope to see the straight line mission videos, glad you’ve made it!

1) I knew it was the Hyatt walkway collapse the moment I saw a mid-western looking city, just couldn't remember which city it was in. I don't think I'd have the willpower to look at all the streets in every midwest city like you did. 2) I had no idea. 3) The Tenerife disaster was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the Canary Islands sign. Some extra details: some terrorist set of a bomb in the main airport for the canary islands. So a ton of flights had been redirected to Tenerife that day. The airport was fairly small and not prepared for the number of planes. Many of the pilots were in a rush to get to their destination. Specifically the plane that was taking off had already fully refueled and it seemed one of the pilots was getting frustrated with how long everything was taking. The extra fuel made the crash even worse. The claim that the control tower were watching a football game is often considered an attempt by Dutch investigators to shift blame, as the airplane that took off without clearance was Dutch and the captain was basically the face of one of their airlines. 4) I instantly thought Russia. But I was thinking of a different disaster, the Ufa train disaster, which happened several decades after the radiation one. In 1989 a gas line leak went unnoticed until two passenger trains traveled close enough to cause a spark and a massive explosion. The trains were carrying a combined total of 1,300 people, 575 died. I was thinking a train track was hidden behind the tree line on the side of the road. I would have been wrong about the place anyway, because I thought both disaster happened further to the west. However both disasters actually happened pretty close to one another. 5) As the sign from every angle stated, it's Waco. Wasn't expecting a tornado, but figured it wasn't the Waco siege because that happened out at their crazy cult compound.

Just what I needed right now, a video from Tom ! Thanks, Tom !

Even though it's been said already: love the effort of making 8-bit Kansas and Chicago songs.

It's always so weird to me when Kansas City shows up in one of these videos, feels even weirder that we're in this one from the skywalk collapse, my grandmother talked about it a lot when she would bring me to Crown Center as a kid, couldn't fault you for not knowing that one as outside of KC locals and Engineers it isn't a well known event really.

Beat your score purely by guessing Ukraine for the Russia one - knew about the Hyatt collapse and Tenerife crash, there are several great docos around about both. Waco I got, but had the wrong tragedy in mind (thought it was weird we were downtown). Slovakia I was only a few miles off your guess. I also spent time looking for the invisible town called 'groceries'. Great game, great vid!

I love the location based music you pick when you fast forward while searching. I really appreciated Chicago and Kansas.

Love this series. Entertaining and informative. More of this please!

"What is wrong with the Soviets?" Everything, f*cking everything...

13:24 "We could be on Tenerife" *zooms in at big sign saying Tenerife* *zooms out*

I love this series! It's really interesting to see these disasters that are so catastrophic yet not many know about/ they were forgotten about

Love this series, hope it continues!

Really, really like this series Tom!

I think this is my favourite series.. keep them coming Tom!

"Even when you're on the ground" is the most common misconception about aviation there is. I don't have the exact numbers, but being on or near the ground is BY FAR the most dangerous part of a flight. Once you're up in the air your relatively safe...

I love how you started the video. A great joke and a great insight in one swift question.

The Kansas City disaster is wild, I've heard about it before but never realized where it happened

The music in the first location was genius.

Happy to hear you still alive Tom after your recent straight line mission. 👍 Looking forward to seeing how u got on. When can we expect the video??

love this series! combining my special interests of geoguessr and disasters its autism heaven

My first time playing along, a respectable 18,519. Just about to watch your final round...... fair play mate not beating that! Got you on the Russia round though ;) annd we were exactly the same distance away in Slovakia, spooky. Great video :) Can't wait for the new Straight Line Adventure!!

This was a killer episode Tom, thanks

This map is by far one of my favorites, I’d love to see more of it

Love this series. Fascinating stuff.

This might be my favorite series!

The way I IMMEDIATELY recognised that first building! Never been so excited in MY LIFE.

The only reason I knew about the Waco tornado was because there is a lot of info about it in the Dr. Pepper museum in Waco, when I went there 😂

Really enjoyed this one. I know it’s a bit morbid but very interesting to learn of these things.

“Was there a shooting in Chicago?” Hahaha. There’s like a dozen every day

I really enjoyed the music in this one, Tom!

Regarding the Kyshytm accident: I initially thought the map was referring to the meteorite that came down not far south of the location in 2013, but you're probably right that they were referring to the nuclear accident.

Remember the first upload?

This was really fun!! I have a bit of an interest in mass casualty disasters, but very little experience in Geoguessing, so I worked backwards with my knowledge of these disasters to guess the locations. My score was 20065. The radiation contamination in Russia got me, though! I thought we might be looking at the Utoya mass shooting in Norway. It was also on a lake.

Super excited for the straight line mission, when will it be out on youtube? Determined I'll see you out and about at some point in my lifetime, what a bloke 👌💎

I'm so glad you were recording

"That is an *chuckles* absolute disaster, innit? Are we recording?" Hahaha that comedic timing I cant 😂😂😂

This is probably my favorite GeoWizard series honestly, other than your travels.

Love this map!! More please❤

Don't forget about how to use that compass, very good for narrowing down cities in places where whole city grids have the same angle (in official coverage at least). You can easily skip certain cities like Chicago with a perfect north-south grid if you see the grid is tilted NNE a bit (like the Missouri side of KC)

Love this series

Putting Kansas - Carry On My Wayward Son on during the time skips on round 1 was cheeky ;)

This is so interesting I could watch for hours

More of these episodes please!

Good to see these again

RIP to genuine checks if he’s recording. seems apt to discover this on a tragic backstories video haha

Love this series!

Only slightly depressing, but historically interesting.

Can't wait till see the next straight line!

21:35 I honestly thought it was the siege. That's how people know of the place... I'm really enjoying this series !

I'm more glad that you noticed the Slovakian URL than you were. I was shouting at my screen when you started looking in the wrong place :D

I like how Tom mentions that he wasn’t alive, so he wouldn’t know about it 😅

Never thought Harry from the Sidemen randomly dropping airplane disaster facts would make me instantly know where we were in geoguessr and what the disaster was but alas here I am

You’ve gotta appreciate him playing a Kansas song while he is clicking through Kansas…

The eight bit cover of Chicago in the first location was class

Love these!

The reason for the walkway collapse is amazing "it wasn't built correctly" is a good teaser

Really surprised that you hadn't heard of Tenerife, Waco or the bridge collapse. Good video - and interesting concept.

These are my favorite videos

Absolutely wild that I can see where I work down the street in the first round in Kansas City. Was not expecting to see my work in the distance in the form of a video today