My parents did this, but after my father died, my mother thought nothing of hopping on a plane and going someplace alone.
My husband and I also did this, although it only came up once–but that once was about six months after two kids who were at tennis camp with our sons had been orphaned when both their parents were en route to France when their plane crashed.
My parents did that–they had 5 kids and there was no one willing to take on all 5 of us, if the worst happened. They did this when they flew to Nassau, South America, China, Russia and the Antartic. Nowadays, they fly together all the time.
Sometimes they also would split up the driving: one would drive with 2 kids; one would fly with the other 3 (when traveling with the kids). But we also often took long car trips all together, so perhaps the flight/car trips were so they wouldn’t have to rent a car once we got to our destination.
I don’t think it’s weird at all. If we were going someplace sans kids, we’d probably do the same. (then again, our oldest is almost 21, so she might get custody of the 12 year old… something we need to figure out just so we know).
Sounds bizarre and needlessly paranoid to me. So what if the planes they were on crashed into each other? They ever think THAT could happen?
Oh come on, THAT could never happen…
In one of the first urban legends I ever heard, my mother recounted a tale of two parents who took separate flights so that if one crashed, the other would survive. They left LA for New York, and the two flights crashed into each other over the Grand Canyon.*
For some reason, this was her justification for separate flights!
As I said, after my father died (unrelated to airplanes) she didn’t seem to mind at all going off somewhere on a plane without me.
Well what if they took an early and a late flight so that one was already long-landed before the other one even took off, huh? That’d work! 
My thought about separate flights would instead first go to a recent flight I was on, where a man was sitting next to me and (I assume) his wife was in the row ahead of us, sitting next to another unrelated singleton traveler. I realized this when he reached up and tapped her and asked for something, and she handed back a magazine. I got her attention and offered to switch places with her so she could sit with him. She said, “No thanks, I don’t like him that much.”
I thought she was joking, but she remained seated. :eek:
My anecdotal addition to this thread come by way of a story about a kid who was a couple of years ahead of me in high school. The story was that his parents took separate flights to Vegas for a vacation for just the two of them. Unfortunately, they were booked into the MGM Grand hotel where they both perished in a fire. Now the part I know is true is that they did indeed die in the fire, but the part about the separate flights to avoid leaving their kids orphaned was never verified.
Last year when I worked in Afghanistan, we had a married couple on our team who refused to both be on our chopper when we went over conflict zones for this reason. It was the first time I had heard of it.
Well, being in a helicopter over a conflict/combat zone does present somewhat stronger odds of calamity than being a passenger on a domestic commercial-aviation fixed-wing jet.
I know a family where both parents were killed in plane crash (about 5 years ago) , it was, of course, a devasting event. They had 4 children under 13.
Granted, it was a small plane crash not a commercial flight…but still.
Travelling to a family wedding years ago my parents fearing the loss of an entire family in an air disaster had the girls fly and the boys drive. So we got to shuttle grandma and toddlers thru airports while the guys ripped a trail through Texas and had a ball.
I came in to post the very same thing.
Sorrow indeed floats.
LOL.
Dad wasnt as dumb as he pretended to be was he? 