You know the question, “do bad things like plane crashes happens in threes?” I personally don’t believe in that until last Friday (7 Nov 2014)… where we had 3 mishaps of a peculiar (to the eye of the beholder) nature. On the same day:
- Lion Air Boeing 737-900ER PK-LFP in Balikpapan. Aircraft right elevator and stabilizer hit by a mobile staircase. No fatalities, no injuries.
- Ariana Afghan Airlines 737-400 YA-PIE in Kabul. Aircraft right main landing gear collapsed upon landing. No fatalities, no injuries.
- Air Canada Express (Jazz) Dash-8-Q400 C-GGBF. Aircraft right main landing gear collapsed on completion of landing. No fatalities, 3 light injuries.
Surely, this single day having 3 accidents involving the right-hand side of the aircraft where 2 were landing gear collapses, is a unique case, but is there any truth to the question?
A quick search revealed that since 1996, there is an occurrence once a year where 3 crashes happens with less than 10 days separation between events, except for 2007 and 2009 (although 2007 saw 3 non-fatal incident/accidents involving the same aircraft type within 10 days of each other).
Well known crashes that were part of these sequences include the Swissair 111, the Concorde crash, Comair crash in Lexington, and Spanair in Madrid. But in a lot of these sequences, the causes are not related (except for weather).
We can now say for certain that accidents do happen in threes and fours, and even fives… No sixes or above yet.