In fact, since late December 2008, there had been five airliner crashes around the world, three of them fatal. After a string of events like this, a common belief in the minds of many travelers is that accidents are not random, and that belief often shows up as the question "Do bad things like plane crashes happen in threes?"
Noted aviation safety expert Dr. Todd Curtis, like many of his colleagues, had dismissed this kind of idea as nonsense. However, that changed once he looked at the situation a little more closely. From 1996, the year he started the aviation safety web site http://AirSafe.com, to 2008, every year except 2007 had at least one period where three or more plane crashes happened only a few days apart. At http://www.AirSafeNews.com/
In spite of string of crashes in January and February, they were not close enough in time to count as having "happened in threes" according to Dr. Curtis. However, there are still 10 months left to go in 2009.
