I have a personal interest in the recent Air Asia flight QZ8501 disappearance as I use them regularly and live in the region they largely cover.
While looking for news stories I came across a report that a large number of people (about 30) had just not turned up for the flight. (No shows)
It’s quite normal for people to do this, we’re not talking cancellations here but passengers who just don’t turn up… sudden illness, accident, wife hides the luggage… etc etc, but 30 is off the scale.
When I first read The Stand by Stephen King, he had plague survivors heading for Boulder having an around the campfire bull session and a sociologist claims that statistically planes that crash have a larger number of “no shows” than those that don’t and I wondered whether this was a figment of King’s imagination for the purpose of an entertaining read or was based on a real survey.
Your responses in this thread make me wonder if you’re actually interested in a factually based answer to your initial question, or whether you simply want to hear people confirm a preestablished opinion that premonition exists.
The simple facts are: In each and avery single of the countless commercial flights that take place each day, there are passengers who don’t show up. There are, also for each and every flight, passengers who were initially booked on another flight and got transferred to the one we’re looking at. This occcurs on a daily basis, but of course you normally don’t hear about it; journalists, novelists, and filmmakers make a big story out of no shows it when that particular flight ends in a disaster to support alleged stories of premonition. In addition, as Richard Pearse oints out, the reverse scenario (people who were initially booked on another flight but were changed to the doomed one) also occurs, but is usually much less talked about. The whole thing is the classic scenario of confirmation bias: People approach the question with a preestablished opinion of something they believe in; then they pay great attention to observations which confirm their opinion but disregard those that debunk it. If you want a factual answer to your question, then you should wonder whether the rate of no shows (and the reverse scenario, people changed to a doomed flight from another one) deviates, in a statistically significant extent, from industry averages. A skeptic would very much doubt that this is the case, and Lord Feldon’s figure shows that the number of no shows for QZ8501 is perfectly in line with the averages. Your reply that we should distinguish between domestic and international flights is, of course, not an invalid one; but I wonder whether you made that comment because you wanted to approach the question in an objective, unprejudiced way, or whether you simply wanted to get rid of a fact that is not in line with a preestablished belief.
QZ8501 had a party of 10 arrive late and miss it. That’s nearly half the no shows in one group. The reason they missed it was because the flight was rescheduled for two hours earlier than its original departure time and they didn’t get the message the airline sent them. This could very well explain many of the other no shows too.
Relatively frequent flyer here (well; 100 or so segments a year).
I have a premonition every time I fly that I will die on that plane.
I have a premonition when the plane gets a mechanical delay that I should get off it and rebook.
I have a premonition that if I rebook, the new flight will be the one that crashes.
Mostly I ignore all these premonitions because they are scientifically unsound.
But if you surveyed me after a flight I missed crashed, I would say I had a premonition that it was going to crash. And frankly, that particular premonition would grow in importance since the plane I missed actually did crash.
Whenever you hear about a crash, the peripheral story of those who made and missed the flight become elevated in significance.
But there is no predictive value at all to “premonitions,” plane crash-related or otherwise.
Ok, once more, Did Stephen King create the survey he used in his novel or was it based on fact?
That was my question, not some desire to prove my personal belief in premonition.
When I first read The Stand by Stephen King, he had plague survivors heading for Boulder having an around the campfire bull session and a sociologist claims that statistically planes that crash have a larger number of “no shows” than those that don’t and I wondered whether this was a figment of King’s imagination for the purpose of an entertaining read or was based on a real survey.
Unless you can get King to point something out the answer is no, it wasn’t a real survey. Even if there is such a survey in existence only King can tell us whether or not he saw it.
It seems another message board and a blog covered the same question before we did. Result: Most likely, King simply made it up. Even though his novel gives the year when the survey was said to have been published and the alleged author’s name, people haven’t been able to find the paper in the academic databases.
Worth repeating this because the above is exactly what occurs every day (and not just for air accidents). There are probably tens of thousands of people who view flying in exactly the way that Chief Pedant does. It is a racing certainty that a fraction of those will, sooner or later, be involved in a near miss situation with a flight crashing. The desire of the media for an “interesting angle” and the natural human pattern-seeking behaviour will do the rest…thus the premonition meme takes hold.
NOTE: I have not found the original paper yet (I thought the internet had everything … must be on the dark net). I have found a few things that reference the paper but I cannot verify that the paper actually exists. Even if the statistics are right the conclusion does not have to be psychic or other worldly. There are differences in vehicles that have less people and luggage in them which may help to cause a crash.
Google comes up with a book with reference to this paper:
Aspects of Consciousness: Essays on Physics, Death and the Mind (mentioned on page 11)
I’m not a statistician, but the way it reads is that it is a significant number of people that do not take trains which will crash. Ticket or no ticket the rider-ship is down on trains that crash.
Quote from another site…
"W. E. Cox, in a well-known study (1956), analysed the number of tickets sold for 28 passenger trains that crashed between 1950 and 1955. He found that the trains that crashed always had fewer people than similar trains on the same day of the previous week. The data was also analysed for weather conditions, and number of sold tickets on the previous day, week, and month. Because every statistical result can be explained as random fluctuation, the author calculated the probability of accumulating the same statistics randomly. This probability was less than 1/100. In other words, we can say with 99/100 certainty that people really have - and use - their psychic intuition to avoid dangerous situations. "
If there have been other related studies since then that question the validity of these stats, that would interest me.