Coincidences

I was sitting at the gate at Changi Airport in Singapore on 4 November 2019, waiting to board a flight to Melbourne, Australia. It was my first flight on Qantas, and I was thinking about that line from the movie Rain Man: "Qantas never crashed."

While I felt pretty good about Qantas' flying record, this would also be my first time flying on an A380, so I wondered if any had ever crashed or had any other incidents. I looked up “a380 crash” on my phone, and what do you know? The first hit was a Wikipedia article about a Qantas A380 uncontained engine failure, which had occurred four minutes after takeoff… from Changi!

Even wilder was the fact that it had happened 9 years earlier, to the day. Wow, what a coincidence!

Oh, wait… it was a flight from Changi to Australia. Hmm. Well, of course it was, right? It's Qantas.

While I was still chuckling about all these coincidences, I looked up the registration number of the plane, VH-OQA, on Flightradar24, just to see where it had been.

That's when I discovered that the plane I was about to fly to Melbourne was the same plane that had the uncontained engine failure 9 years earlier.