Someone’s Lucky Day (And A Conspiracy Theory) June 30, 2009
Posted by Benjamin Wendell in News Of The Weird, World Events.Tags: airbus crash, boeing, children, ntsb, sole survivor, toddlers
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Another Airbus took an untimely dip in the ocean this morning, and it got me to thinking. First off, there was a “senior pilot” interviewed on CNN this morning, who went into great detail about what safe airplanes these Airbuses are, how one takes off nearly every minute somewhere in the world, and how the French Airbus and the Yemeni Airbus are radically different planes. Umm…yeah, but two have crashed into the ocean within a month. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but if I was an NTSB investigator, I’d be interviewing some guys from Boeing, who’ve had significant problems selling their latest 787 passenger plane. I’m just sayin’.
The other half of this crash story is the miraculous survival of a five year-old child who was plucked from among the wreckage in the ocean. In my aging and sometimes flawed memory, it seemed to me that quite often in these stories of sole survivors, the lucky soul is a baby or very young child, so I checked it out: Top 10 Sole Survivors Of A Plane Crash – Listverse and sure enough, three of these ten were children, a very high proportion given that the overwhelming majority of fliers were adults. I found one other: Toddler survives deadly plane crash – Americas- msnbc.com. So it makes you wonder what it is about children that might make them more likely to survive a multi-g-force decceleration injury, or whether these kids had particularly vigilant guardian angels. I also wonder if these kids became extraordinary adults in any way. It would make an interesting sociological study for some enterprising grad student (and if someone does it, I expect attribution…).
BW
I recently finished a book on the very subject of surviving:
The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood.
I know you’re not quite the non-fiction fan I am, but it’s an excellent listen.