There is probably somebody missing for every flight that takes off. Once in a while there’s a crash, and voila, the guy missed the plane and it crashed. No big mystery!
A co-worker of mine was scheduled to be on the Korean Air flight that was shot down over Russia. It happened before I started working there but I personally knew the guy. Of course, we had three to ten employees flying to and from Asia a week in those days and we constantly rescheduled our departure dates for various reasons. We lost some cargo on that flight but thankfully, no people.
Happened in the Twilight Zone
Modern airlines use a hub system to connect passengers efficiently. It is likely that weather related crashes have passengers that missed the flight due to weather related connector delays.
Something similar happened to my neighbors. Original flight from Hawaii was delayed and they missed their connection. The airline bumped them up to first class on the next available flight they had. It turned out to Flight 232.
Apparently the same thing happened to the guy who would later train Barbaro, Michael Matz.
He survived. They didn’t.
Johnny Rotten also missed Flight 103 (see link).
This myth was mentioned in Stephen King’s The Stand, in a conversation between Glen Bateman and Stuart Redman. “Full planes never crash,” Bateman says, attributing this to latent psychic powers and precognition, to which Redman says “Oh bull shit!”
It’s a perfectly feasible and rational statement, if you also assume full planes also rarely take off. If planes are almost never 100% filled to capacity, then logically, full planes will also rarely crash.
My grandmother was supposed to be on this plane. But she was running late and decided to stay in Denver to go to the prayer meeting at her son-in-law’s church. She is sure God saved her, I can’t argue that.
Small world. I knew several people on that plane that crashed. It was…difficult.
Think about it this way: Airlines routinely overbook their flights. That is to say, they have more people booked on each flight than there are seats. The airlines do this because they know statistically that some percentage of the booked passengers will not make the flight. This is the reason that, when more booked passengers show up than they expected, the airlines will ask for volunteers among confirmed passegers to take a later flight for compensation, or they will sometimes bump confirmed passengers involuntarily. Here’s a New York Times article on the practice.
Let’s say that a flight with 150 seats is 10% overbooked by the airline. That means that at a minimum there were 15 people that were booked on the flight but didn’t get on, either by being a no-show or by being voluntarily or involuntarily bumped. If that 150 seat plane crashes, that means that there are at least 15 people who were booked but missed the flight.
Given that there are always no-shows, and particularly with overbooked flights, for every flight that crashes or otherwise has difficulties, there will be passengers in the situation described in the OP.
So I guess that means that God wanted everyone who did make the flight to die. I wonder what she thinks they did to piss Him off.
Author Jerzy Kosinski was held up at customs in N.Y. coming into the U.S. in 1969. If that hadn’t happened, he would have been at the house on Cielo Drive along with Sharon Tate and her fellow murder victims.
If the dog hadn’t stopped to shit, he would have caught the rabbit. And that’s about the sum of all the coincidences you all are describing.