Is it true that the flights that end with a crash are late or do not come more passengers than usual?

There is an statement that, according to statistics, on airplanes that will fail, passengers are much more likely to be late or do not sit down for other reasons. We checked where this belief came from.

Users of entertainment write about this mystical coincidence Portals And services questions and answers, Lifestail, sites coach, News aggregators and the media, among which "News" And "Komsomolskaya Truth".

The authors of many such publications refer to the sociologist James Staunton, who allegedly studied railway and plane crashes and found out that “doomed” trains and planes were filled by only 61%, while on average this indicator was 76%. The scientist, approved, published his research in 1958 in the Journal of Sociology.

Although such a magazine and exists (it is published on the Australian Sociological Association), release It began only in 1965. A scientist named James Stunton (this is how the surname Staunton is pronounced in Russian) Engaged Not at all sociology, but with chemistry.

Search by Google Books helps to find not only the works of this chemist, but also the mention of the sociologist with the same surname. True, this is not a real person - he was invented by the writer Stephen King. In his novel "Confrontation"(1978) says (translation of Victor Weber):

“You someday read the study of James D.L. Staunton dedicated to rail and aviation disasters? In 1958, he published an article in a sociological journal, and the tabloids constantly quote it. <...> Staunton took the statistics of 50 aviation disasters that happened after 1925, and more than 200 railway, which happened after 1900. I entered these data into the computer. He was interested in three indicators: the total number of passengers, the number of dead and the capacity of the vehicle. <...> He entered another set of data into the computer - this time by airplanes and trains flying or driving the same routes, but reached the destination without incident. <...> In those cases when disasters occurred, the fullness of vehicles was 61%. In those cases when it did without incident - 76%. The difference of 15% is very significant, and you will not blame it for a statistical error. <...> The conclusion of Stauton: people knew what trains and planes to crash ... subconsciously they predicted the future. " 

Further, one of the heroes of the novel says that about a week after reading the article of Staunton, he had a chance to double -check the conclusions of the sociologist - at the Logan Airport near Boston, a plane crashed from Denver. The character found out the airline’s employees that 16 passengers did not appear on that flight, although usually there were only three of them. It is noteworthy that some Media Retell This episode of “confrontation” as a real story - King himself called in their airline in their presentation. However, at the Logan airport, the crash of the aircraft heading from Denver never took place. 

“Komsomolskaya Pravda” in 2011 not only issued a study of the invented sociologist Staunton for the real one and talked about the find of King, but I presented it More fresh statistics with reference to Russian scientists. “Over the past 20 years, the flights that ended with disasters have abandoned 18% more passengers than prosperous,” Valery Isakov, candidate of mechanical and mathematical sciences, told Tabloid. “Verified” did not find this study or a scientist with such a name in the bases of scientific citation (however, the newspaper itself presented it in a note as the leader of a small group of researchers of anomalous phenomena).

Studies about how many passengers are late or handed over tickets for flights that crash are not able to detect. This is understandable, because collecting data for correct calculations is extremely difficult. Firstly, many airlines are in the public or secretly practitioner overbucking - The sale of a larger number of tickets than places on the plane. In this case, any completely filled flight will have those who “stayed overboard”, and if the plane crashes, they will be lucky. Secondly, oveverbucking exists because, according to the internal statistics of the air market, an average of 10% of passengers do not come to their flight-they are late, get sick, change plans, etc. These people in the case of disasters will also replenish the ranks of the lucky ones. Thirdly, the airlines modify the aircraft of the same model for their needs (the number of seats in one class can be increased at the expense of another), some seats can be removed to transport the low-mobility passenger or cargo, or even just broken. Finally, the data on how many tickets were sold for a particular flight are absent in a public field, usually only reports about the dead passengers and crew members.

As an example, consider the most Large By the number of victims of the air production in history. In 1977, the Boeing 747-121 and Boeing 747-2068 aircraft collided at the Kanar Islands, 583 people died. Although the aircraft models are known, it was not possible to find data on the exact number of seats on them. Also, there is no information about how many tickets were sold for each of the flights, how many passengers did not appear or handed over tickets. The only affordable information - The passenger came from one of the flights during the transplant, deciding not to fly with friends, but to stay with his boyfriend. There is no other information about the largest catastrophe in the history of mankind, whether one of the passengers could feel and avoid death.

Thus, the “statistical” data that people often do not sit on the plane, if this is his last flight, are taken from fiction, and not scientific publications. Moreover, it is very difficult to conduct such a study correctly, if not impossible. 

Image on the cover: Masterpiece AI

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?