The plot of the film "Destination", in which death catches up with victims who escaped death in a plane crash, has fed the fears of fatalists for years. The Bird In Flight team looked for real-life stories that could inspire thriller writers for new episodes.
Statistics show that every year there are fewer accidents in the sky. The share of accidents today averages 3 per 1 million flights. But the numbers fade away when you start thinking the worst on board.
The worst, however, can happen anywhere or not at all. Bird In Flight investigated whether there were genuine stories that believers in the predetermination of life could refer to.
Reserve player
On December 13, 1977, Air Indiana Flight 216 from Evansville to Nashville was delayed by three hours due to bad weather. 26 passengers languished in the waiting room. Half of them are the Evansville University Purple Aces basketball team. In the capital of the state of Tennessee, they had to fight with the local Blue Raiders team. A minute and a half after the long-awaited takeoff, the plane crashed into the ground at the edge of the airport. Experts named the actions of the pilot and overloading of the luggage compartment as the reasons for the tragedy. It was noted that a control error would not have led to a crash, if not for the weight of the baggage, which shifted the center of gravity of the aircraft. There are no survivors left.
The only member of the crew, freshman David Furr, who did not show up for the flight due to an ankle injury, could be considered a real lucky one. But he managed to outlive his comrades for only two weeks - returning home after a basketball game from Newton, Illinois, Furr and his 16-year-old brother died in a car accident, colliding with a car driven by a drunk driver.
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False luck
32 years after the disaster in Evansville, the story of the Italian woman John Ganthaler and her husband circulated around the world: they, as the newspapers wrote, were lucky to miss the Air France 447 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. On June 1, 2009, the largest disaster in the history of the airline took place: falling into the Atlantic Ocean, the Airbus A330 airliner killed all 216 passengers and 12 crew members. The investigation into the causes of the crash took three years.
Two weeks later, the world media retold the story of a car accident involving an Italian couple: death overtook Joanna in the Austrian town of Kufstein - a car driven by a woman collided with a truck. However, the spouse Ganthaler, who survived the collision, unexpectedly denied the spread rumor about the failed flight from Rio - it turned out that that day the couple was not going to fly by Air France, but safely crossed the ocean aboard the plane of the Spanish airline Iberia, which took off from Sao Paulo.
Experience versus technology
In 2007, a homemade plane flight nearly cost the lives of two Experimental Aviation Association members: Elsie Warren and his daughter Phyllis Jean Rydings. The aircraft that caught fire during the flight miraculously managed to land in the field. After the accident, Rydings explained their salvation by the level of her father's training - for more than 50 years he built aircraft engines, worked for Boeing for NASA and participated in the construction of equipment for the Gemini space program.
Alas, the design experience did not save the family from the tragedy four years later. On the morning of May 7, 2011, 70-year-old Warren and 52-year-old Rydings were heading for an air show in Temple, Texas. On takeoff, the cockpit of the Ravin 500 - an amateur aircraft that existed in the world in only 23 copies - began to smoke. Requesting an emergency landing, the pilots attempted to land but crashed. When the rescuers got to the wreckage of the plane that crashed a kilometer from the airfield, no one was alive.
Coincidence
On July 6, 2013, an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777, en route from Seoul, crashed at the San Francisco International Airport due to a series of errors made by pilots during descent and landing. Upon hitting the ground, the tail section and the left engine came off the plane. Having slipped the bottom along the runway, the liner jumped up sharply, turned 360 degrees and slipped a few more meters until it came to a complete stop. The right engine caught fire, the fire began to spread through the fuselage.
Of the 307 people on board, only three were killed - Chinese schoolgirls on their way to a summer religious camp in the United States. Two were thrown out of the rear of the plane after a hull broke in a crash (experts later concluded that the girls could have survived if they fastened their seatbelts), while the third schoolgirl survived the fall and waited for the rescuers to arrive. 16-year-old Ye Meng Yuan was lying on the runway 9 meters from the plane - under a layer of fire foam. It was not easy to notice her in the hustle and bustle. Having passed back, one of the rescue vehicles drove over it, which became the cause of death.
Lucky unlucky
The most fortunate among the unlucky is Frane Selak. In 2003, a 73-year-old music teacher from Croatia won more than $ 1 million in the lottery and married for the fifth time. In numerous interviews, he told the incredible story of how he had run away from death seven times before. His collection of safely survived disasters includes the crash of a DC-8 plane over Croatia in 1963, a train crash into a river, and several fairly serious car accidents.
Although there is no doubt that Selak will win, the rest of his biography raises questions. In particular, Internet users could not find any confirmation of the plane crash over Croatia in 1963.